Publication: Social Protection, Poverty and the Post-2015 Agenda
Date
2013-05
ISSN
Published
2013-05
Author(s)
Abstract
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.
Citation
“Fiszbein, Ariel; Kanbur, Ravi; Yemtsov, Ruslan. 2013. Social Protection, Poverty and the Post-2015 Agenda. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 6469. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/15601 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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