The Social Protection Indicator for the Pacific

Assessing Progress

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• Publisher: Asian Development Bank
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9789292616687
• eBook ISBN:
  9789292616694
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This publication provides updates on Social Protection Indicators of 13 Pacific developing member countries of the Asian Development Bank. It presents an analysis of 2015 data on social protection programs in the countries, particularly the substantial progress in terms of expenditure and benefit size between 2009 and 2015. Spending favored the nonpoor over the poor. Yet, spending on women remained behind that on men, with the gap even widening. The Social Protection Index---now the Social Protection Indicator---was developed by the Asian Development Bank and its partners as the first comprehensive and quantitative measure of social protection systems in Asia and the Pacific.

1
Overview and Methodology

This report presents the analysis of comprehensive 2015 data on social protection programs in 13 Pacific countries.¹ It uses the Social Protection Indicator (SPI) for assessing social protection within and across countries.

This report continues the effort to systematically track and assess developments in social protection. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) and its development partners originally developed its precursor—the Social Protection Index—in 2005 as a tool to monitor social protection in Asia and the Pacific. This report updates the results of a 2012 analysis for the Pacific published in 2016 (ADB 2016).

Systematic and comprehensive monitoring and evaluation are essential for improving social protection systems to enhance their capacity to support the poor and vulnerable. The SPI approach offers uniform indicators that can help governments and other stakeholders assess the effectiveness of social protection systems and to track progress over time. At country level, it assesses social protection systems as well as progress. At cross-country level, it can help trace and assess patterns in social protection. This SPI monitoring helps track the progress of Target 1.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).²

The analysis in this report is useful for two reasons. First, the report provides data on all types of government social protection initiatives, focusing on aggregate expenditure, coverage, benefit size, and poverty and gender dimensions. This enables one to assess social protection as a system by looking at social protection as a whole. The SPI thus complements existing national monitoring and evaluation tools, which tend to focus on individual programs rather than the overall system.

Second, the SPI analysis allows a focus on distinct areas of social protection activities. It provides disaggregated data on components of social protection systems and allows one to assess their relative significance. These components comprise three “categories”—social insurance, social assistance, and active labor market programs (ALMPs)—and include corresponding “programs” such as health insurance, pensions, and welfare assistance (Table 1).

Table 1: Social Protection Categories and Programs

Sources: ADB. 2011. The Revised Social Protection Index: Methodology and Handbook. Manila; 2016. The Social Protection Indicator: Assessing Results for the Pacific. Manila.

The analysis of 2015 data in this report follows the methodology used in the previous 2016 publication (using 2012 data). This report also presents comparisons of social protection indicators for 13 Pacific countries from 2009 to 2015.

What Is the Social Protection Indicator?

The SPI is an indicator for assessing social protection effectiveness within and across countries. Going beyond measuring social protection expenditure as a share of aggregate gross domestic product (GDP), the SPI assesses expenditure for each intended beneficiary as a share of GDP per capita. Intended beneficiary population groups are the key unit for assessing social protection effectiveness in this report—in other words, the share of the population that could qualify for benefits from a particular social protection category and program. The report distinguishes intended beneficiaries from actual beneficiaries, that is, those given support in practice. This distinction is captured by the coverage indicator, which measures the share of actual beneficiaries in the total intended beneficiary population. The SPI is a relative indicator against the GDP per capita of each country.³

Table 2 presents the main intended beneficiary groups for each of the programs. A detailed explanation for defining and selecting the groups is in ADB (2011).

Table 2: Social Protection Programs and Intended Beneficiary Groups

Program	Group
Health insurance	Employed population
Health assistance	Poor population
Unemployment insurance	Employed population
Pensions	Population aged 60 years and above
Welfare assistance	Poor population (living below the nationally defined poverty line, all ages)
Child welfare	Children aged 0-14 years
Assistance to the elderly	Older persons
Disability benefits	Persons with disabilities
Active labor market programs	Unemployed and underemployed

Source: ADB. 2011. The Revised Social Protection Index: Methodology and Handbook. Manila.

Methodology for Deriving the Indicators

Using 2015 data, this report draws on the methodology set out in ADB (2011), which provides a detailed explanation of defining and constructing the SPI and key data sources. The information required for the analysis falls into two general categories: basic statistics and indicators; and data on social protection expenditure and on the number of social protection beneficiaries. The following data sources were used: government statistics and reports, reports by international financial institutions and bilateral agencies, discussions and interviews with agencies responsible for social protection, and household survey data.

Throughout this report, most averages are unweighted. This represents a methodological choice, signifying that indicators for each country are treated as equal in weight to those in any other country.

For the 2015 Pacific update, a thorough and careful review of social protection measures has been undertaken across the Pacific region. With the availability of updated data for 2009 and 2012, the SPIs for these two years have therefore been revised. In particular, some important revisions to expenditure on social insurance have been made to 2009 and 2012 SPI data, notably for Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Papua New Guinea, and Samoa. In addition, the cash-for-work ALMPs in Kiribati and the Marshall Islands have now been included in the SPI calculation; these two programs directly support incomes of poor outer-island households. The revised figures for 2009 and 2012, together with the 2015 data, where feasible, are presented in this report.

Results on the coverage of SPI show some countries exceeding 100% of intended beneficiaries. This simply means that in some countries, beneficiaries may receive more than one kind of social protection. For example, an elderly person may receive some form of pension while receiving health assistance benefits.

The analysis of social protection in the Pacific is also carried out by countries’ income levels and regional groupings (Table 3). There are two country income groups based on World Bank classification: upper-middle-income countries (UMICs) and lower-middle-income countries (LMICs).⁴

Table 3: Country Classifications by Income Group and Region

By Income Group^a	By Region^b
Upper-middle-income countries Cook Islands Fiji Marshall Islands Nauru^c Palau	Micronesia Federated States of Micronesia Kiribati Marshall Islands Nauru Palau
Lower-middle-income countries Federated States of Micronesia Kiribati Papua New Guinea Samoa Solomon Islands Timor-Leste Tonga Vanuatu	Melanesia Fiji Papua New Guinea Solomon Islands T...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables, Figures, and Boxes
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Executive Summary
• 1 Overview and Methodology
• 2 Spending on Social Protection—General Results
• 3 Social Protection Spending by Category and Program
• 4 Coverage and Benefit Size of Social Protection
• 5 Poverty and Gender Dimensions of Social Protection Spending
• 6 Changes in Social Protection from 2009 to 2015
• 7 Conclusions
• Appendix
• References
• Footnotes
• Back Cover