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Poland
(2018)
Poland belongs to the first wave of pension reformers in Central and Eastern Europe. The Polish pension reform of the late 1990s can serve as a case study for the challenges faced when implementing a radical paradigmatic pension reform towards a privatized DC scheme. This report analyses the background of the original reform, discusses its political, social and economic impact and explains the reasons for later reform reversals. The report stresses that the two re-reform waves, which took place in 2011 and 2013, were mainly driven by fiscal considerations. Since the current system maintains the DC scheme applied to both public and private tiers, the recent reversal of privatization will not improve benefit levels.
Social protection measures require sustainable financing – creating and maintaining adequate fiscal space at the national level. Good governance of social protection at all stages – planning policies, policy reforms, and implementation – requires continuous monitoring of its performance and finances, including long-term projections and simulations of cost and benefits of different social protection programs and overall social protection systems. These projections and simulations should take into account demographic trends, including demographic ageing.
This paper documents the reversal of pension privatization and the reforms that took place in the 1990s and 2000s in Poland. The report analyses the political economy of different reform proposals, and the characteristics of the new pension system, including laws enacted, coverage, benefit adequacy, financing and contribution rates, governance and social security administration, social dialogue, positive impacts and other key issues of Poland’s pension system.
This policy brief investigates the costs of child poverty in the Balkans, including deprivation in terms of education, health, and social mobility. It then lays out the potential of social protection, most notably in terms of building resilence and fostering development. Set against recent case studies from around the world, including Cambodia and Uganda, the brief gives policy recommendations on various critical issues including transfer schemes, transformative measures, and (alternative) care for children with disabilities.
This policy brief is part of a wider research project entitled ‘Building the Economic Case for Investments in Social Protection’. The research aims at demonstrating the potential impacts of social protection on inclusive growth. The project is a collaborative effort between the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance at the University of Maastricht and United Nations University-MERIT, NL; the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester, UK; the School of Social Science at the University of Makerere, Uganda; and the Expanding Social Protection Programme of the Ugandan Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development. This project is part of the research agenda of the Knowledge Platform Inclusive Development Policies and funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands through the NWO-WOTRO programme.
This policy brief is part of a wider research project entitled ‘Building the Economic Case for Investments in Social Protection’. The research aims at demonstrating the potential impacts of social protection on inclusive growth. The project is a collaborative effort between the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance at the University of Maastricht and United Nations University-MERIT, NL; the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester, UK; the School of Social Science at the University of Makerere, Uganda; and the Expanding Social Protection Programme of the Ugandan Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development. This project is part of the research agenda of the Knowledge Platform Inclusive Development Policies and funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands through the NWO-WOTRO programme.
This paper analyzes the complex effects and risks of social protection programmes in Ghana and Kenya on poor people’s human wellbeing, voice and empowerment and interactions with the social protection regulatory framework and policy instruments. For this purpose, it adopts a comprehensive Inclusive Development framework to systematically explore the complex effects of cash transfers and health insurance at the individual, household and community level. The findings highlight the positive provisionary and preventive effects of social protection, but also illustrate that the poorest are still excluded and that promotive effects, in the form of enhanced productivity, manifest themselves mainly for the people who are less resource poor. They can build more effectively upon an existing asset base, capabilities, power and social relations to counter the exclusionary mechanisms of the system, address inequity concerns and offset the transaction costs of accessing and benefitting from social protection. The inclusive development framework enables to lay these complex effects and interactions bear, and points to areas that require more longitudinal and mixed methodology research.
The paper contributes to the debate on the political economy of implementation of propoor social policy. It argues for a broadening of the debate, which is dominated by technocratic arguments, emphasizing the lack of financial resources, technology or skills as the major barriers for effective implementation. Describing the dynamic interplay of ‘formal’ operational programme structures and ‘informal’ traditional institutions in delivering the CT-OVC – the largest and oldest cash transfer programme in Kenya – it argues for the need to look more closely into the local political economy as an important mediating arena for implementing social policies. Implementation is heavily contingent upon the local social, political and institutional context that influences and shapes its outcomes. These processes are highly dynamic and ambivalent evolving between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ structures and institutions. They may change over time and place, challenging the implicit assumption that programmes are evenly implemented across geographic and political entities.
Persons with disabilities have much lower employment rates than the population as a whole and are at a significantly higher risk of living in poverty (OECD, 2011, pp. 50-56 and WHO, 2011, pp. 237-239). However, many of the barriers people with disabilities face, with regards to labor market reintegration, are in fact avoidable. There has for quite some time been evidence that differences in employment and wages, between disabled and non-disabled workers, can only to a limited extent be explained by differences in human capital endowments and productivity (Kidd, Sloane, & Ferko, 2000). Instead, factors such as the absence of access to education and training, and the lack of financial assistance provided are actually significant drivers of labor market exclusion (OECD, 2009, p.15; WHO, 2011, p.239).