other benefits such as unemployment benefit sick pay and child allowances all of which are much better targeted than pensions have remained underfunded progress in the field of social assistance was less marked than in latin america as social protection had an entirely different meaning and modus operandi under central planning as a result these countries initially lacked the administrative infrastructure to manage social assistance programmes prevalent in market economies for instance in the early years of transition many eefsu countries introduced universal child allowances but later on transformed them into meanstested programmes