1.3.
Social Protection programs and spending
The late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century marked the beginning of the establishment of social protection (SP) systems for today’s developed countries (ILO 2019). The ILO defines SP as “the set of public measures that a society provides for its members to protect them against economic and social distress caused by the absence or a substantial reduction of income from work as a result of various
contingencies (sickness, maternity, employment injury, unemployment, invalidity, old age or death of the breadwinner), the provision of health care and the provision of benefits for families with children” (ILO, 2004,
pg. 2). Similarly, the OCDE defines social protection as “the extent to which countries assume responsibility for supporting the standard of living of disadvantaged or vulnerable groups” (OECD 2019). Appendix A1
provides, for comparative purposes, additional definitions of social protection as coined by other international organizations and the relation to the SDGs. For purposes of this paper, we adopt the taxonomy
of social protection instruments used by O’Brien et al. (O'Brien, et al. 2018), which dissects the instruments into four main pillars: “social assistance, social care, social insurance, and labor market policies”, as presented in Figure 3.
Figure 3 - Social protection instruments
Source: (O'Brien, et al. 2018) The social assistance pillar is generally provided to recipients from a state budget. Its main goal is often to alleviate or prevent poverty, guarantee food security, or reduce vulnerability across the life cycle. Three
types of policy instruments are often used in countries (through either national or local-level programs or ad-hoc initiatives). These are social transfers, public work programs, and fee waivers. Under the social transfers, cash transfers have grown to become instruments included in national schemes as well as adhoc local projects the favored choice of policymakers and recipients – they are periodic, predictable, and
usually regular, and they can be in the form of Unconditional Cash Transfers (UCTs) – provided without specific requirements to a target recipient population, and Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) – requiring specific conditions be met by recipients. The latter are expected to improve income predictability while simultaneously decreasing the inter-generational transmission of poverty.
Vouchers, or other in-kind transfers can include lunch boxes to children in school, for example. The public works programs sometimes qualify as labor market interventions, which are planned by the state but run
at local level, aiming both to increase employment opportunities and improve income stability of program participants (O'Brien, et al. 2018). Finally, while fee waivers and subsidies help reduce prices, they have been 11
