Social Protection In Asia

The Book Presents An Overview Of Issues Related To Social Protection In Asia And Argues That The Provision Of Social Protection Should Be Seen As A Core Issue Of Development That Needs Urgent Action By Governments, Society And The Organizations And Advocacy Groups Of The Poor.

The rising number of older persons in Asia has accentuated the importance of strengthening the systems of social protection in the region. This book examines the effectiveness and relevance of noncontributory or social pensions in supporting older persons in Asia. It discusses the political economy and financial sustainability of social pension reform, implications for gender equity and social rights, and design and implementation challenges. Case studies from Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand, Viet Nam, and South Caucasus and Central Asia provide key lessons for informing development policy and practice in Asia and the Pacific.

This publication examines the need to expand social protection coverage of the informal sector to support working age productivity, reduce vulnerability, and improve economic opportunity. Case studies from Bangladesh, the People's Republic of China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand offer suggestions to close social protection gaps and recommend policy solutions to create equitable and inclusive social protection programs for informal workers.

This report assesses social protection measures in Asia and outlines the need for more inclusive, shock-responsive policies to cut poverty and to spur equitable development. Centered around ADB’s Social Protection Indicator, it assesses data from 26 countries to show how measures are evolving to provide increased support and opportunities for the poor, women, and people with disabilities. Explaining why the COVID-19 pandemic made many more vulnerable, the report suggests that it also offers opportunities for longer-term expansion of social protection. It proposes measures for strengthening data collection and compilation to enhance design and effectiveness of social protection.

This book focuses on relatively unexplored areas in pension and health care arrangements, including financing, in East Asia. The book aims to fill the literature gap on social protection in East Asia by covering issues such as pension and health care arrangements in the depopulating high income countries of Japan and Korea; the challenges of the pay-out phase in Defined Contribution (DC) arrangements in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore; and the extension of coverage of social protection schemes in China, India, and Indonesia. It also reviews social protection from a much wider perspective and extends coverage of social protection in terms of both the proportion of the population with access to the social protection scheme and the types of risks faced by the households and by society as a whole. The book also gives attention to reforms of civil service pensions.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is committed to develop and update a comprehensive set of comparable and accessible data to help measure performance of social protection programs in Asia. The Social Protection Indicator (SPI) report presents data on government social protection programs collected from 25 countries in Asia---while a companion publication covers the 13 countries in the Pacific. This report is an update of The Social Protection Index: Assessing Results for Asia and the Pacific published by ADB in 2013. It helps monitor and assess the nature of governments' social insurance, social assistance, and labor market programs in Asia.

This Report aims to contribute to the policy discourse on the direction and impact of social protection in Asia and the Pacific. While many countries of the region have some form of social protection in place, only a fraction of those who need assistance actually benefit. Still, these programmes can act as the building blocks for more comprehensive social protection systems which can meet the needs of so many more. It then promotes universal coverage as a way to most effectively and proactively impact on people's lives, and especially the most vulnerable groups in society. This Report also presents the political and economic case for social protection and the need to bring social protection into the mainstream of development policy formulation.

The Asian crisis of the late 1990s severely affected some of the most successful economies in the region, placing the issue of social protection high on the regional and international agenda. Subsequently, growth rates revived, but the fruits of growth have not been evenly distributed and inequality has risen. Behind this trend lie deeply entrenched forms of poverty and social exclusion as well as new forms of vulnerability resulting from the liberalisation of markets and growing exposure to the global economy. This volume deals with issues of poverty, vulnerability and social exclusion in the Asian context. The articles deal with different groups of vulnerable people, exploring some of the characteristics of vulnerability in different contexts, and reflecting on appropriate policy responses. Collectively, they emphasise a broad-based systemic approach to the problems of vulnerability and insecurity, where social protection needs to be ‘rescued’ from its dominant current conceptualisation as a response to risk and crisis, and instead be integrated into the mainstream of development policy. This book will interest scholars of economics, politics, development studies, development economics, sociology, social policy, and South Asian studies.