Publication: Towards More Effective Social Assistance in Russia: An Update of the System Performance Considering New National Target of Halving Poverty by 2024
Loading...
Published
2019-06-24
ISSN
Date
2019-08-15
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
This report updates the assessment of the performance of the social protection (SP) system in Russia, using the 2014-2017 rounds of the Survey on Incomes and the Participation in Social Programs (VNDN in Russian) by the State Statistic Service of the Russian Federation (Rosstat), the largest household annual monitoring survey in Russia, and the main source of official data on poverty. The 2017 VNDN Survey round has a sample (about 150,000 households) that is 3 times larger than its standard sample size and it allows for a comprehensive assessment of the SP system performance both at the national and the regional levels. The context for the update is the 2018 May Decree by the President of Russia5, which defined the new strategic goals for socio-economic development and poverty alleviation in Russia. The Decree put human development and poverty reduction at the center of the Russia’s development strategy over the medium term. To achieve the May decree goals by 2024, the Government developed 12 National Projects, particularly in health, support to families and education, and allocated significant resources for their implementation. The national goals include halving poverty, increasing the quality of education and improving health status to extend longevity and economically active life. For social protection, the objectives pertain to higher efficiency and effectiveness, greater share of resources directed to families in need of assistance, better performance results and stronger alignment with human development goals. More recently, the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection launched a series of regional pilots to inform decisionmakers on good practice examples in implementing the reform in the regions. This update is intended to feed into this on-going process, enabling the World Bank team to continue to support the Government of the Russian Federation in its efforts to improve efficacy of its social assistance system. Through the RAS project, the social assistance team of the World Bank has established itself as credible source of robust analysis and solid technical advice.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Posarac, Aleksandra; Yemtsov, Ruslan; Nagernyak, Maria; Albegova, Irina. 2019. Towards More Effective Social Assistance in Russia: An Update of the System Performance Considering New National Target of Halving Poverty by 2024. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/32255 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Reducing Poverty through Growth and Social Policy Reform in Russia(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006)Following the 1998 financial crisis, four out of every ten people slipped into poverty, not able to meet basic needs. Luckily, post-crisis economic rebound was impressive and broad-based, albeit uneven across sectors and regions. This title explores the nature of poverty, both nationally and regionally, to identify the groups with a high poverty risk. It then examines growth-poverty linkages through the labor market, as well as the contribution of growth and inequality to the recent poverty reduction. It also considers the expected impact of WTO accession on overall growth and poverty. Finally, it focuses on the scope for improving social policy in ways that will have a direct impact on the poor.Publication How Can Safety Nets Contribute to Economic Growth?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-05)The paper provides an up-to date and selective review of the literature on how social safety nets contribute to growth. The evidence is carefully chosen to show how safety nets have the potential to overcome constraints on growth linked to market failures, and is organized into 4 distinct pathways: i) encouraging asset accumulation by changing incentives and by addressing imperfections in financial markets caused by constraints in obtaining credit, and from information asymmetries; overcoming such failures helps households to invest into their human capital or productive assets; ii) failures in insurance markets especially in low income setting; safety nets are assisting in managing risk both ex post and ex ante; iii) safety nets are overcoming failure to create assets and other local economy complementary factors to household-level investments; iv) safety nets are shown to relax political constraints on policy. Safety nets have a dual objective of directly alleviating poverty through transfers to the poor and of triggering higher growth for the poor. However, the trade-off between the dual objectives of equity and growth is not eliminated by the potential for productive safety nets; this remains critical for designing social policies.Publication Social Protection, Poverty and the Post-2015 Agenda(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-05)Social protection is absent from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and only recently has gained some prominence in the post-2015 discourse. In the past quarter century, however, rising inequality has often accompanied economic growth. At the same time, the growing importance of risk and vulnerability on the wellbeing of the poor has been recognized. Further, there is now a consensus on adopting more ambitious goals on poverty reduction. Defining social protection as a collection of programs that address risk, vulnerability, inequality and poverty through a system of transfers in cash or in kind, this paper argues that social protection needs to be on the post-2015 agenda as a key element of the discourse. It provides an empirical overview of social protection around the world based on the World Bank's Atlas of Social Protection: Indicators of Resilience and Equity (ASPIRE) data set. Focusing on the goal of ending poverty, the paper estimates that social protection programs are currently preventing 150 million people from falling into poverty. Based on the data set, the paper develops, tentatively and for discussion, a set of candidate goals, indicators and targets for the acceleration of poverty reduction through social protection. The authors ask what it would take for social protection programs to contribute to halving the poverty gap in a country. They show that if all countries could achieve the actual poverty reduction efficiency already observed in the top quartile of countries, then 70 percent of the countries in the sample could achieve this goal. However, for 30 percent of the countries, even reaching the top quartile on efficiency will not be enough -- for these countries, the issue is one of budgetary adequacy.Publication Household Strategies for Coping with Poverty and Social Exclusion in Post-Crisis Russia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2001-02)What strategies have Russian households used, to cope with economic hardship in the wake of recent financial crisis? Which coping strategies have been most effective in reducing poverty for different groups of households? And how have people been able to adapt to the dramatic drop in formal cash incomes? The authors look at these questions using subjective evaluations of coping strategies used by household survey respondents to mitigate the effects of the Russian financial crisis on their welfare. The data come from two rounds (1996 and 1998) of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. The results of their analysis show that a household's choice of survival strategy, strongly depends on its human capital: the higher its level of human capital, the more likely it is to choose an active strategy (such as finding a supplementary job, or increasing home production). Households with low levels of human capital, those headed by pensioners, and those whose members have low levels of education, are more likely to suffer social exclusion. To prevent poverty from becoming entrenched, the trend toward marginalization, and impoverishment of these groups of households, needs to be monitored, and targeted policy interventions need to be undertaken to reverse the trend.Publication Social Assistance Transfers in Bosnia and Herzegovina : Moving Toward a More Sustainable and Better-Targeted Safety Net(Washington, DC, 2009-04-30)Public expenditures on non-insurance social protection cash transfers absorb a huge share of the entities' respective budgets. This level of spending requires buoyant public revenues. However, public revenues will be under continuing pressure in view of the impending economic crisis. Moreover, devoting a large proportion of public funds to social transfers has the effect of crowding out resources that could be devoted to public investments which will be increasingly needed to stimulate growth as the economy begins to sag under the impact of the world economic crisis. In addition, there is evidence that some rights based programs create disincentives for employment. This situation is fiscally unsustainable, economically inefficient, and socially inequitable. Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH) needs to completely overhaul it s non-insurance social protection cash transfer programs. There are many ways in which BH could reform these programs and put in place measures aimed at developing a social safety net that is: (a) less of a burden on public resources, (b) more efficient, and (c) better targeted to the poor. Specifically, it is recommended that the governments in BH consider a three pronged approach with measures to: 1) improve and introduce targeting mechanisms to better channel resources to the poor; 2) strengthen benefits administration and beneficiary registry systems; and, 3) rationalize disability-related benefit schemes. An increasingly widespread recognition of the need for rationalization of the non-insurance social protection cash benefits is discernible in both the decision-making circles and in the public discourse in BH.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Classroom Assessment to Support Foundational Literacy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-21)This document focuses primarily on how classroom assessment activities can measure students’ literacy skills as they progress along a learning trajectory towards reading fluently and with comprehension by the end of primary school grades. The document addresses considerations regarding the design and implementation of early grade reading classroom assessment, provides examples of assessment activities from a variety of countries and contexts, and discusses the importance of incorporating classroom assessment practices into teacher training and professional development opportunities for teachers. The structure of the document is as follows. The first section presents definitions and addresses basic questions on classroom assessment. Section 2 covers the intersection between assessment and early grade reading by discussing how learning assessment can measure early grade reading skills following the reading learning trajectory. Section 3 compares some of the most common early grade literacy assessment tools with respect to the early grade reading skills and developmental phases. Section 4 of the document addresses teacher training considerations in developing, scoring, and using early grade reading assessment. Additional issues in assessing reading skills in the classroom and using assessment results to improve teaching and learning are reviewed in section 5. Throughout the document, country cases are presented to demonstrate how assessment activities can be implemented in the classroom in different contexts.Publication Global Economic Prospects, January 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-16)Global growth is expected to hold steady at 2.7 percent in 2025-26. However, the global economy appears to be settling at a low growth rate that will be insufficient to foster sustained economic development—with the possibility of further headwinds from heightened policy uncertainty and adverse trade policy shifts, geopolitical tensions, persistent inflation, and climate-related natural disasters. Against this backdrop, emerging market and developing economies are set to enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century with per capita incomes on a trajectory that implies substantially slower catch-up toward advanced-economy living standards than they previously experienced. Without course corrections, most low-income countries are unlikely to graduate to middle-income status by the middle of the century. Policy action at both global and national levels is needed to foster a more favorable external environment, enhance macroeconomic stability, reduce structural constraints, address the effects of climate change, and thus accelerate long-term growth and development.Publication Argentina Country Climate and Development Report(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11)The Argentina Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR) explores opportunities and identifies trade-offs for aligning Argentina’s growth and poverty reduction policies with its commitments on, and its ability to withstand, climate change. It assesses how the country can: reduce its vulnerability to climate shocks through targeted public and private investments and adequation of social protection. The report also shows how Argentina can seize the benefits of a global decarbonization path to sustain a more robust economic growth through further development of Argentina’s potential for renewable energy, energy efficiency actions, the lithium value chain, as well as climate-smart agriculture (and land use) options. Given Argentina’s context, this CCDR focuses on win-win policies and investments, which have large co-benefits or can contribute to raising the country’s growth while helping to adapt the economy, also considering how human capital actions can accompany a just transition.Publication Europe and Central Asia Economic Update, Spring 2025: Accelerating Growth through Entrepreneurship, Technology Adoption, and Innovation(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-23)Business dynamism and economic growth in Europe and Central Asia have weakened since the late 2000s, with productivity growth driven largely by resource reallocation between firms and sectors rather than innovation. To move up the value chain, countries need to facilitate technology adoption, stronger domestic competition, and firm-level innovation to build a more dynamic private sector. Governments should move beyond broad support for small- and medium-sized enterprises and focus on enabling the most productive firms to expand and compete globally. Strengthening competition policies, reducing the presence of state-owned enterprises, and ensuring fair market access are crucial. Limited availability of long-term financing and risk capital hinders firm growth and innovation. Economic disruptions are a shock in the short term, but they provide an opportunity for implementing enterprise and structural reforms, all of which are essential for creating better-paying jobs and helping countries in the region to achieve high-income status.Publication Morocco Economic Update, Winter 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-03)Despite the drought causing a modest deceleration of overall GDP growth to 3.2 percent, the Moroccan economy has exhibited some encouraging trends in 2024. Non-agricultural growth has accelerated to an estimated 3.8 percent, driven by a revitalized industrial sector and a rebound in gross capital formation. Inflation has dropped below 1 percent, allowing Bank al-Maghrib to begin easing its monetary policy. While rural labor markets remain depressed, the economy has added close to 162,000 jobs in urban areas. Morocco’s external position remains strong overall, with a moderate current account deficit largely financed by growing foreign direct investment inflows, underpinned by solid investor confidence indicators. Despite significant spending pressures, the debt-to-GDP ratio is slowly declining.