Publication: Bangladesh Social Protection and Labor Review: Towards Smart Social Protection and Jobs for the Poor
Loading...
Date
2016-03
ISSN
Published
2016-03
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Over the past decade, Bangladesh has achieved strong economic growth and impressive poverty reduction. The country’s great strides in human development, reflected in the lowered fertility rate, improved health and epidemiological outcomes, and progress in education, among others, are paving the way for its continued development and economic growth. Despite much progress, however, poverty and vulnerability remains a great challenge. In particular, persistent gaps across different populations exist often due to the labor market conditions experienced by marginalized workers (including unskilled laborers, females, youth, and migrants). In light of such dynamic changes in Bangladesh, the role of comprehensive Social Protection and Labor (SPL) policy to facilitate poor and vulnerable households to adequately respond to and manage various risks, is greater than ever. The recently endorsed National Social Security Strategy (NSSS) proceeds in this direction by adopting the lifecycle approach. This Social Protection and Labor Review report complements the NSSS with discussions on specific issues and policy recommendations. The report reviews the landscape of the sector, identifies key challenges to be overcome, and provides options for policy intervention. Overall, the review emphasizes the need for policy direction to shift from individual programs towards an overall strategy for households; from fragmented safety nets towards a comprehensive system; and from (ex-post) disaster reliefs towards (ex-ante) promotion of productive income generating activities. Therefore, the report greatly underscores the importance of strengthening labor market intervention and developing social insurance while addressing implementation challenges related to existing social assistance programs. In contrast to the multitude of various social assistance programs, Bangladesh currently lacks effective measures to promote labor market employment and productivity and adequate social insurance to hedge various risks. In the short term, the report suggests that policy efforts need to be made to introduce active labor market programs to provide greater employment opportunities, particularly for disadvantaged populations. Strategies to develop a pension system that can cover workers regardless of their type of employment are also needed. These measures will serve as building blocks for broader policies for more, better, and inclusive jobs, and a comprehensive social insurance system, which will contribute to the country’s goal of achieving middle income country status by 2021.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank. 2016. Bangladesh Social Protection and Labor Review: Towards Smart Social Protection and Jobs for the Poor. Bangladesh Development Series,no. 33;. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/25265 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 Social Protection and Labor at the World Bank, 2000-08(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2009)In autumn 2000, the World Bank's board approved the first ever strategy for the new social protection and labor sector, and in January 2001, the sector published the strategy. The subtitle, from safety net to springboard, indicated the World Bank's move toward a broader understanding of poverty reduction and the relationship of risk to poverty. Because risks and access to appropriate risk management instruments matter for poverty reduction and development, the strategy proposed a new conceptual framework - social risk management that will review and reform existing interventions and propose new ones to better assist the vulnerable in addressing the many risks to which they are exposed. After seven years of implementation, it was time to review the strategy and work of the areas of selected core competence: labor market, social insurance (in particular pensions), social safety nets, social funds, disability and development, and risk and vulnerability analysis. The strategic position, its development, and the results by the sector since the launch of its strategy were reviewed and presented to the World Bank's committee on development effectiveness at the end of 2007. The review included a stocktaking of the analytical work and lending operations in each of the six core competence areas. The result of this review and the six stocktaking papers are presented in this publication. They reveal the progress that the World Bank has made in understanding the importance of social risk management for poverty reduction and the critical contribution it makes to equitable and sustainable growth.Publication Sri Lanka : Strengthening Social Protection(Washington, DC, 2007-01-16)This report reviews Sri Lanka's social protection programs and proposes strategic options for enhancing their role in promoting growth with equity. Well designed social protection (SP) systems can help address poverty and inequality through redistribution, and mitigate risks and facilitate employment opportunities, thus contributing to both growth and equity goals. The report first identifies the poor and vulnerable (chapter 1) and then reviews and evaluates employment protection and promotion policies and programs (chapter 2), social security/insurance schemes (chapter 3), and safety net programs (chapter 4) and proposes policy options The concluding chapter summarizes key analytical findings and presents a unified policy framework to improve social protection. The report relies mainly on extensive existing literature from Sri Lankan and international researchers. The remaining part of this section summarizes the main issues and policy options.Publication Results Readiness in Social Protection and Labor Operations(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011-02)Social funds represent a diverse universe of World Bank projects. Social funds are defined as agencies or programs that channel grants to communities for small scale development projects. Social funds typically finance some mixture of socio economic infrastructure (e.g. building or rehabilitating schools, health centers, water supply systems,), productive investments (e.g. micro?finance and income generating projects), social services (e.g. supporting nutrition campaigns, literacy programs, youth training, support to the elderly and disabled), and capacity building programs (e.g., training for community based organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and local governments). Social Fund programs are demand driven and aim to involve the active participation of several local actors, often using a community driven development approach. The main goal is usually to address the needs of poor and vulnerable communities while building social capital and empowerment at the local level. Social funds have several features that place them in the social protection (SP) realm. They typically target poor communities and/or vulnerable households. They finance social risk management interventions like temporary employment generation and expanded access to basic services by the poorest. Social funds are often employed to address immediate post?conflict needs and responses to natural disasters.Publication Results Readiness in Social Protection and Labor Operations(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011-02)Social Safety Nets (SSN) are defined as non?contributory transfer programs targeted to the poor or those vulnerable to poverty and shocks. About half of World Bank social protection projects in the reviewed cohort are SSN. They are mostly non-emergency investment operations with a higher presence in Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa regions. Projects aimed at strengthening country's safety nets system, including their targeting, administration and service quality, are the most common type of SSN interventions (25 percent). These are closely followed by conditional cash transfers (20 percent), and health, nutrition and education projects (15 percent). The remaining projects are a mixture of public works; food crisis mitigation measures and other types of safety nets (social inclusion, housing, and technical assistance).Publication Resilience, Equity, and Opportunity(Washington, DC, 2012)Risk and the quest for opportunity feature heavily in economic life in the 21st century. Sustained growth in many developing countries has pulled billions out of poverty and into the middle class; but this economic upturn has yet to reach billions more, who face unemployment, disability, or illness, and struggle to protect themselves and their families against shocks. The poor are particularly vulnerable, being typically more exposed to risk and less able to access opportunities. In a world filled with risk and potential, social protection and labor systems are being built, refined or reformed in almost every country to help people and family's find jobs, improve their productivity, cope with shocks, and invest in the health, education, and well-being of their children. The World Bank supports social protection and labor in client countries as a central part of its mission to reduce poverty through sustainable, inclusive growth. The World Bank's new social protection and labor strategy (2012-22) lays out ways to deepen World Bank involvement, capacity, knowledge, and impact in social protection and labor. Three overarching goals, a clear strategic direction, and engagement principles guide this new strategy: 1) the overarching goals of the strategy are to help improve resilience, equity, and opportunity for people in both low- and middle-income countries; 2) the strategic direction is to help developing countries move from fragmented approaches to more harmonized systems for social protection and labor; and 3) the engagement principles for working with clients are to be country-tailored and evidence based in operations and knowledge work, and collaborative across a range of sectors and actors this new strategy addresses gaps in the current practice by helping make social protection and labor more responsive, more productive, and more inclusive of excluded regions and groups notably low-income countries and the very poor, the disabled, those in the informal sector and, in many cases, women. The strategy is not a 'one size fits all' approach. Instead, it calls for improving evidence, building capacity, and sharing knowledge across countries to facilitate informed, country-specific, fiscally sustainable social protection and labor programs and systems. The World Bank will support this agenda not only through lending, but critically by improving evidence, building capacity, and supporting knowledge sharing and collaboration across countries. This social protection and labor strategy builds on the achievements as well as the lessons from practice over the last decade and more. Moreover, it builds on the basic analytical foundation of the first World Bank social protection and labor strategy.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication World Development Report 2017(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2017-01-30)Why are carefully designed, sensible policies too often not adopted or implemented? When they are, why do they often fail to generate development outcomes such as security, growth, and equity? And why do some bad policies endure? This book addresses these fundamental questions, which are at the heart of development. Policy making and policy implementation do not occur in a vacuum. Rather, they take place in complex political and social settings, in which individuals and groups with unequal power interact within changing rules as they pursue conflicting interests. The process of these interactions is what this Report calls governance, and the space in which these interactions take place, the policy arena. The capacity of actors to commit and their willingness to cooperate and coordinate to achieve socially desirable goals are what matter for effectiveness. However, who bargains, who is excluded, and what barriers block entry to the policy arena determine the selection and implementation of policies and, consequently, their impact on development outcomes. Exclusion, capture, and clientelism are manifestations of power asymmetries that lead to failures to achieve security, growth, and equity. The distribution of power in society is partly determined by history. Yet, there is room for positive change. This Report reveals that governance can mitigate, even overcome, power asymmetries to bring about more effective policy interventions that achieve sustainable improvements in security, growth, and equity. This happens by shifting the incentives of those with power, reshaping their preferences in favor of good outcomes, and taking into account the interests of previously excluded participants. These changes can come about through bargains among elites and greater citizen engagement, as well as by international actors supporting rules that strengthen coalitions for reform.Publication Senegal : Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes (ROSC) : Corporate Governance Country Assessment(Washington, DC, 2006-06)This report provides an assessment of Senegal's corporate governance policy framework, enforcement, and compliance practices. It highlights recent improvements in corporate governance regulation, makes policy recommendations, and provides investors with a benchmark against which to measure corporate governance in Senegal. The report identifies several key next steps that can be carried out in Senegal and that focus on implementation, including: (i) developing program to build awareness of the importance of corporate governance and to train directors in modern corporate governance principles; (ii) drafting a code of corporate governance; (iii) addressing governance weaknesses in the state-owned enterprises. A separate report reviews the special issues for the corporate governance of state-owned enterprises in Senegal; and (iv) revising the Organization for the Harmonization of Business Law in Africa (OHADA) uniform act for commercial companies (over the long term) to incorporate modern corporate governance principles.Publication A Puzzle with Missing Pieces(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-12)The identification of key determinants of aid effectiveness is a long-standing question in the development community. This paper reviews the literature on aid effectiveness at the project level and then extends the inquiry in a variety of dimensions with new data on World Bank investment project financing. It confirms that the country institutional setting and quality of project supervision are associated with project success, as identified previously. However, many aspects of the development project cycle, especially project design, have been difficult to measure and therefore under-investigated. The paper finds that project design, as proxied by the estimated value added of design staff, the presence of prior analytic work, and other specially collected measures, is a significant predictor of ultimate project success. These factors generally grow in predictive importance as the income level of the country rises. The results also indicate that a key determinant of the staff’s contribution is their experience with previous World Bank projects, but not other characteristics such as age, education, or country location. Key inputs to the project production process associated with subsequent performance are not captured in routine data systems, although it is feasible to do so. Further, the conceptualization and measurement of the success of project-based aid should be revisited by evaluative bodies to reflect a project’s theorized contribution to development outcomes.Publication Economy Profile of West Bank and Gaza(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-10-31)Sixteenth in a series of annual reports comparing business regulation in 190 economies, Doing Business 2019 covers 11 areas of business regulation. Ten of these areas - starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and resolving insolvency - are included in the ease of doing business score and ease of doing business ranking. Doing Business also measures features of labor market regulation, which is not included in these two measures. Doing Business provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 190 economies and selected cities at the subnational and regional level. This economy profile presents indicators for West Bank and Gaza; for 2019 West Bank and Gaza ranks 116.Publication Looking Beyond the Horizon(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-06)The story of how the PVH Corp. (referred to throughout this document as PVH) came to leada group of its top suppliers to build factories and a fabric mill in Ethiopia’s Hawassa IndustrialPark (HIP) is the study of a strong collaboration between a private company looking to optimizeits business model and a government aiming to transform its economy through global strategic repositioning. The success of this story hinges upon the intersection of their goals and a shared vision of development that includes a strong commitment to social and environmental goals.PVH was motivated to invest in Ethiopia to respond to shifts in the global apparel sector, its growing desire to retool its business model and to address its concerns about compliance with social and environmental standards in its traditional sourcing locations. PVH had decided to rethink its business model and to look beyond the horizon towards a new region in which tolocate its manufacturing base. To have better oversight and enforcement, PVH moved to adopta fully integrated vertical supply chain, including direct investment in one of the manufacturingfacilities.Key to Ethiopia’s success in attracting this important investor was the government’s ability and willingness to strategically evaluate its foreign direct investment (FDI) needs and strategy and to take steps to evolve into an attractive location for higher value-added export-oriented investment.This case study explains a private investor’s site selection process. It assesses the elements PVH prioritized when deciding to commit to Ethiopia, and specifically to HIP. The case study further assesses the government of Ethiopia’s strategy, level of readiness, interest, and commitment, and sets out some key challenges that lie ahead for this partnership. The case study is structured in ten sections. Section second offers a brief background on the textile and apparel industry, including an explanation of its value chain. It provides a brief corporate profile of PVH and its current global footprint and business model. Section third describes the site selection process: PVH´s initial explorations in Africa, its consideration of several African countries, and its initial conversations and negotiations with Ethiopian authorities. Section fourth discusses the Ethiopian government’s strategy to attract and expand export-oriented investments, including efforts to bolster the country’s competitiveness. This section attempts to offer some explanation why Ethiopia was the right fit at the right time and its level of readiness to land such an investment. It provides a brief profile of PVH’s Africa point of entry, the HIP. Section sixth covers the challenges that lie ahead for this-project---potential setbacks that will affect not only the consolidation and growth of the textiles and apparel industry in Ethiopia, but also the government’s vision of becoming the “manufacturing powerhouse of Africa.” Section eighth concludes with some key lessons from PVH’s decision to invest in Ethiopia. Such lessons may be relevant to countries or regions interested inattracting FDI and may be of particular interest to other African countries in their quest to attract major investments in the textile and apparel sector.