Asia S Fiscal Challenge Financing The Social Protection Agenda Of The Sustainable Development Goals

This book focuses on the analysis of fiscal requirements to achieve the social protection agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals. Developing countries in Asia have expanded their social protection programs. One of the key challenges is creating sustainable financing--considered the bedrock for success of the social protection agendas of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Agenda and Strategy 2030 of the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Also outlined in this book are options to close the gaps in population coverage and adequacy of protection of social assistance, health care, and social insurance systems of ADB developing members over the next decade.

Social protection is central to the goal of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) of achieving the inclusive growth agenda in Asia and the Pacific. The report takes stock of ADB's support for social protection and the progress with implementing ADB's Social Protection Strategy. It presents the institution's social protection interventions from 1996 up to 2013.

The book examines the conceptual, economic, and fiscal impact(s) of the Social Protection Floor (SPF) initiative of the International Labor Organisation (ILO) and other policy influencers by first critically examining the methodologies used by the international agencies to estimate the fiscal costs of designated minimum package(s) of social protection programs. The book also briefly reviews the methodologies used and usefulness of the Social Protection Index (SPI) of the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Second, the book analyses strategies and specific initiatives used by the selected East Asian countries (China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam), designed to progress towards the social protection goals underlying the Social Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in September 2015, and endorsed by the countries covered in this book. Finally, the book provides a framework for generating fiscal space to fund the social protection programs and initiatives. The country chapters utilise this framework in the context of each specific country to suggest generating fiscal space.

This exciting and innovative Handbook provides readers with a comprehensive and globally relevant overview of the instruments, actors and design features of social protection systems, as well as their application and impacts in practice. It is the first book that centres around system building globally, a theme that has gained political importance yet has received relatively little attention in academia.

Adaptive social protection (ASP) helps to build the resilience of poor and vulnerable households to the impacts of large, covariate shocks, such as natural disasters, economic crises, pandemics, conflict, and forced displacement. Through the provision of transfers and services directly to these households, ASP supports their capacity to prepare for, cope with, and adapt to the shocks they face—before, during, and after these shocks occur. Over the long term, by supporting these three capacities, ASP can provide a pathway to a more resilient state for households that may otherwise lack the resources to move out of chronically vulnerable situations. Adaptive Social Protection: Building Resilience to Shocks outlines an organizing framework for the design and implementation of ASP, providing insights into the ways in which social protection systems can be made more capable of building household resilience. By way of its four building blocks—programs, information, finance, and institutional arrangements and partnerships—the framework highlights both the elements of existing social protection systems that are the cornerstones for building household resilience, as well as the additional investments that are central to enhancing their ability to generate these outcomes. In this report, the ASP framework and its building blocks have been elaborated primarily in relation to natural disasters and associated climate change. Nevertheless, many of the priorities identified within each building block are also pertinent to the design and implementation of ASP across other types of shocks, providing a foundation for a structured approach to the advancement of this rapidly evolving and complex agenda.

Global progress on the Sustainable Development Goals will depend to a large extent on the collective action of South Asia to implement them. The sub-region indeed accounts for almost one fourth of the world's population, 36 per cent of the world's poor and nearly half of the world's malnourished children. The sub-region's success in implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, however, hinges on addressing current capacity gaps and strengthening the means of implementation. Recognizing the host of challenges faced by the sub-region, UNESCAP has attempted in the present Report, to unpack the 2030 Agenda at the sub-regional level, outlining tangible, high priority and relevant policy actions that are critical to achieve sustainable development in South Asia. The Report identifies seven key priorities that can help accelerate the SDG achievement in South Asia by leveraging the relationships between the Goals. Based on rigorous policy simulations and evidence, it offers insight into ways a regionally coordinated sustainable industrialization strategy could generate more than 56 million new jobs by 2030 in South Asia, and lift 71 million additional people out of poverty, relative to a business-as-usual scenario. It is hoped that this Report will be useful for analysts and practitioners of development policy in the sub-region and beyond, in stimulating a debate on the ways and means of bringing sustainable prosperity to all in the dynamic and population subregion of South Asia.

Welfare states around the globe are changing, challenged by the development of knowledge economies. In many countries, policy-makers' main response has been to modernize welfare states by focusing on future-oriented social investment policies that focus on creating, mobilizing, and preserving human skills and capabilities. Yet, there is massive variance in the development of social investment strategies. The World Politics of Social Investment: Welfare States in the 21st Century is the first of two volumes of the World Politics of Social Investment (WOPSI) project, which systematically maps and explains different welfare reform strategies in democratic countries around the world. This volume develops a theory on the political and socio-economic conditions for the development of social investment policies around the globe, and studies the impact of the main explanatory factors on the empirical variety of social investment reforms (and non-social investment reforms). It also proposes a new typology of different welfare reform strategies, distinguishing nine types of social investment strategies depending on their functions (creating, mobilizing and preserving human skill and capabilities) and their distributive profiles (inclusive, stratified or targeted), and three types of non-social investment welfare strategies (market liberalism, social protectionism and basic income). The chapters of this volume are written by leading social policy scholars from different disciplines and countries, who apply the WOPSI global theoretical framework in a range of contexts and policy fields, shedding light on the scope conditions of social investment, as well as political demand- and supply-side drivers of social investment reforms. This volume on its own or in conjunction with the second volume is an invaluable resource on the state of modern welfare and social investment policies from around the globe.