Wednesday 7 May 2014

DECONSTRUCTING SOCIAL PROTECTION IN LOW-INCOME COUNTRIES INCLUDING INDIA

Dr. Anurag Priyadarshee

Context
Social protection (sometimes also referred to as social security, more so in India) has become a buzzword among policymakers, particularly in low-income countries, engaged in designing measures to reduce poverty. Justification of social protection is often premised on the argument that it may not be possible to address the structural causes of poverty within the prevalent political and economic environment of many low-income countries. Most important structural causes of poverty are associated with unequal distribution of factors of production, mainly, land and capital. Such unequal distribution results in poor facing a limited supply of the factors of production making it very difficult for them to participate in the process of economic growth. Poor are also unable to adequately access the health and educational infrastructure due to their assetlessness, and thus most often fail to build up their capabilities. The situation is compounded due to continued social exclusion and discrimination. Although a section of advocates of social protection acknowledge the structural causes of poverty they also argue that absence of social protection measures and safety nets for the poor and vulnerable perpetuates poverty among them. As the policymakers find it infeasible to correct the distributional aspects of poverty in the given politico-economic environment, they are increasingly realizing that availability of social protection measures may help in reducing the severity of the poverty situation to a large extent.

What Is Social Protection?
Social protection is generally described to include public actions taken in response to levels of vulnerability, risk, and deprivation, which are deemed socially unacceptable within a given society. Such actions also include interventions and initiatives that enhance the social status and rights of the marginalised. Basic idea of social protection is to use social means to prevent deprivation, and vulnerability to deprivation. Social Protection thus has a strong poverty focus. Social protection evolved in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a comprehensive set of programmes to respond to multidimensionality of poverty. Such a response also reflected an increasing recognition of the perceived inadequacy of social safety nets, which were criticised as ‘residualist and paternalistic’ (Sabates-Wheeler and Devereux, 2008: 64).  

Various social protection measures are possible and need to be taken to reduce and mitigate such risks and vulnerabilities at the levels of individuals, households, and communities. Dreze and Sen (1991) argue that there may be two aspects of such measures; protection aspects that concern protecting the living standards and assume paramount importance at the times of social and economic shocks such as famines, and promotional aspects that aim to improve the general living standards and address deprivation and vulnerabilities. The objectives of one aspect may be very different from those of the other but the implementation strategies involving them may not be completely independent of each other. Moreover, the achievements in respect of one may feed into the other of the other. For example, success with the promotional aspects may ease the implementation of protection aspects (for example, higher incomes may make individual insurance less painful). Sabates-Wheeler and Devereux (2008: 69) extend such classification to include the social protection measures in four categories, namely, provision, preventive, promotive and transformative measures. According to them, the provision measures aim to reduce and mitigate deprivation, while the preventive measures attempt to prevent the incidence of deprivation and include various poverty alleviation measures. Promotive measures focus on improving incomes and capabilities ‘through a range of livelihood-enhancing programmes targeted at both households and individuals’. The transformative measures target social injustice and various kinds of exclusion.

Social protection programmes can be categorised in three broad groups of programmes: social insurance, social assistance and labour market regulations. Social insurance consists of programmes that aim to protect against contingencies such as maternity, old age, sickness, or unemployment. Social assistance programmes aim to support those in poverty, while labour market regulations ensure basic work standards and minimum wages for work etc. (Barientos and Hulme, 2008).

According to Munro (2008), justification of social protection policies derives traditionally from three different discourses. The risks and market failures discourse provides reasons of failures in insurance markets often due to informational issues, along with the failures in credit, human capital and labour markets to justify provision of social protection. The rights-based discourse advocates for social protection to fulfill the obligations to grant legally enforceable social and economic rights to its citizens on the part of the State. Needs-based discourse on the other hand invokes practical and moral arguments in favour of reducing and alleviating chronic poverty, and promotes employing social protection measures in achieving that. The constraints that the poor face may have different explanations resulting in different approaches towards social protection as means of addressing such constraints. Thus the overarching role and purpose of social protection may be to reduce social risk and market failures, satisfaction of basic needs, or contribute to human development through rights-based approach depending upon the strategies the policy makers adopt while addressing the aforementioned constraints. For example, market failure discourse was largely responsible for enhanced social and economic roles of the State and thus the growth of the modern welfare state.

Social protection as a major attribute of the welfare state has existed in the industrially developed countries in the form of social welfare assistance, insurance, and employment generation and protection. Fallouts of structural adjustment programmes, various economic crises, and effects of globalisation have motivated the low- income countries too to incorporate social protection programmes within their policy frameworks since the early 1990s. Social protection in such countries is therefore largely focussed on poverty reduction and relies increasingly on transfer of incomes in conjunction with employment generation, creation of assets and provision of basic services.

Formal sector employment declined in most low-income countries as a result of structural adjustment policies. Such policies also resulted in decrease of wages in both public and private sectors. Thus, the contributory base was eroded for the statutory social insurance schemes. Structural adjustment policies further resulted in the massive cuts in social budgets thus adversely affecting the government contributions towards social insurance. Such schemes were therefore not as successful in low-income countries as in industrialised countries, particularly in case of a large majority of workers who worked outside the formal sectors. They could not afford to contribute to such schemes. In many cases, they were also not inclined to contribute towards the schemes that were not designed to meet their specific needs. These schemes were therefore largely limited to formal sector workers. Due to this reason, the social insurance schemes in low-income countries further skewed the income distribution in favour of formal sector workers especially because of the government subsidies on such schemes, as corresponding subsidies were not available to informal sector workers. This, in effect, results in transfer of resources from the informal sector workers to formal sector workers that strengthened the privileges of especially the elite in defence and civil services. A section of scholars thus advocates for limiting the social protection privileges and expanding the social protection benefits. Structural adjustment programmes and influence of neo-liberal discourse also limited the state’s role in providing health education services that adversely affected the informal sector workers and the poor. Recurrent global economic crises and effects of increasing globalisation in trade and services further deteriorated the economic condition and bargaining power of the poor in low-income countries (for example, Stiglitz, 2002; Basu, 2006).

Social protection in its current form evolved as a political and economic response to this situation in low-income countries. This explains why although the social insurance models in low-income countries generally follow the basic structures of such programmes in industrialised countries, the scope of social assistance programmes is much wider in low-income countries. In addition to protecting the poor from deprivation by helping them maintain a certain level of consumption as in industrialised countries, they aim to enhance their productive capacity by investing in their human capital development and in their physical asset formation. They further aim to help the poor to reduce their social exclusion by providing them with access to basic services and enhancing their participation in various social and other institutions. Social assistance is also sometimes employed to address the inequality issues in view of the widespread poverty in low-income countries (Barrientos and Hulme, 2008). Other aspects of social protection include empowering the poor and strengthening their agency to reduce and alleviate their poverty (Sabates-Wheeler and Devereux, 2008).

It is now being increasingly acknowledged that poverty reduction policies based on strategies of economic growth alone lead to skewed outcomes across geographical and social spaces (for example, Chen and Ravaillon, 2004). As Dreze and Sen (1991: 10) argue, the issues of ‘widespread, persistent deprivation’ and the ‘fragility of individual security’ in low-income countries cannot be adequately dealt with the ‘standard channels of economic growth and social progress’ alone, as is generally believed to have been the case with the high-income countries. They contend that such a belief is misplaced as the general improvements in the conditions of living in high-income countries have been achieved through various social policies and public expenditures in the areas of education, health, employment and food security; rather than through economic growth alone. Moreover, the Gross National Product (GNP) per head measurements of the prosperity of a nation may not be a true indicator of the capabilities enjoyed by its population at large. Such measurements do not take into account the inequalities prevailing in the distribution of incomes and variations of incomes over time in individual cases.

It has been observed that the personal needs are higher at the time of reduced incomes, such as when an earning member of a household is suffering from ill health. Such income fluctuations could be more efficiently dealt with if insurance and capital markets were well functional but that is usually not the case in respect of low-income countries. Even otherwise, high individual incomes may not necessarily imply enhanced capabilities especially in absence of other social provisions such as in the areas of health and education. This analysis thus indicates that ‘economic growth alone cannot be relied upon to deal either with the promotion or with the protection of living standards’ (Dreze and Sen, 1991: 14). ‘Limitations of private markets in generating good living conditions’ may also render such strategies of social protection based on economic growth alone infeasible (Dreze and Sen, 1991: 31). Moreover, as Platteau (1991: 163) points out that, ‘[w]hile market forces and institutions may help in reducing the risk of hunger, particularly in so far as they increase self-reliance by diversifying sources of income and supply as well as market outlays, they also open the way for new sources of vulnerability’.

Dreze and Sen (1991: 32) further cite the experience of China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Jamaica and Sri Lanka to argue that it is not necessary to wait for high economic growth to achieve substantial improvements in the general living conditions for a large section of the population through appropriate public action.

Social Protection In India
Various aspects of social protection constituted an important part of the agenda of the Indian Freedom movement and the government of newly-independent India initiated several social protection programmes. Such programmes were considerably scaled up and new programmes were initiated in the late 1960s and early 1970s in response to various natural calamities, droughts and food shortages during that period. Next phase of spurt in social protection was witnessed in the later half of 1990s, when it was realised that the gains from economic reforms and increased globalisation of Indian economy were largely bypassing a large section of the society. Various social protection programmes were therefore scaled up and new programmes such as those guaranteed under National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and later Right to Food Act were launched.

Panagariya (2008) strongly correlates the increase in the rate of growth of Indian economy to the process of reform and liberalisation and claims that it has also led to substantial reduction in poverty. Reports of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS)[1] however clearly show that the people engaged in informal employment, constituting 93% of India’s total workforce, are steeped in poverty and that their deprivation has not been reduced substantially during the period from 1993-94 to 2004-05 associated with large-scale reforms in Indian economy. According to such reports, the employment growth rate plummeted during this period to 1.85% on an average from over two percent on an average in the immediately preceding ten years. More importantly, such growth in employment was almost entirely limited to the informal sectors of economy. This did not help the people, additionally employed during this period, to come out of poverty. Real wage growth rate also fell during this period. NCEUS thus concludes that the substantial jump in the economic growth was not translated into employment generation and enhancement of incomes for a large number of Indians.
Quality of employment was also found to be adversely affected in general during the period of high economic growth due to a process of informalisation of a section of formal sector workers, and job-cuts in government and public sectors. Increased tendency to outsource various types of work to contractors in the formal, including the government and public, sectors also contributed to this phenomenon (e.g., Breman 2010) Such informalisation, associated with low wages, longer working hours, and general lack of employment and social security further contributed to poverty among the informalised workers and deteriorated their living conditions.
Breman (2010) argues that the claims of poverty reduction due to economic growth caused by liberalisation of economy are largely based on the assessment of benefits accrued to the section of population possessing some means of production such as land, equipments or other forms of petty capital. Poor, however, lack resources and thus means of production, and sell their low-skilled or unskilled labour to earn livelihoods. They do not gain from increased growth rates in the economy. According to him, high levels of growth in Indian economy have greatly benefited the upper and middle classes, having means of production and/or formal sector employment, while a large section of population engaged in informal employment has not been able to participate in the Indian economic growth process. Increase in productivity with stagnating employment, during 1993-94 to 2004-05, as pointed out in the NCEUS reports, may also mean that the labour has been exploited even more during the period of high economic growth than before (Breman 2010). Topalova (2008) also demonstrated that the rate of reduction of poverty decreased substantially after introduction of the economic reforms.

Social Protection And Poverty
Social protection is being increasingly recognised as an important instrument to promote social and economic development (ILO, 2005). A large and varied body of evidence suggests that social protection programmes effectively contribute towards reduction of poverty and vulnerability. Poverty reduction policies based on strategies of economic growth alone lead to skewed outcomes across geographical and social spaces. Social protection measures are therefore needed to deepen and widen the poverty impacts of economic growth. They help the households come out of poverty traps caused due to low incomes and limited opportunities. Social transfers, especially the conditional transfer programmes, promote enhancement of human capital.

There is now a general consensus on poverty being multidimensional and caused mainly due to the constraints the poor face while attempting to participate in, and benefit from the economic activities and opportunities. Increased emphasis on social protection in low-income countries during recent times may be seen as a response to such understanding of poverty. The constraints that the poor face may have different explanations resulting in different approaches towards social protection as means of addressing such constraints. Thus the overarching role and purpose of social protection may be to reduce social risk, satisfaction of basic needs, or contribute to human development through rights-based approach depending upon the strategies the policy makers adopt while addressing the aforementioned constraints. It is however observed that over the last decade the focus of social protection programmes has moved from social risk and basic needs perspectives towards enhancement of human capabilities. They also mention that social protection has now become one of the three main elements of national development strategies along with economic growth and human development. The speed with which social protection programmes have been scaled up in the low-income countries over the last decade is unprecedented. Barrientos and Hulme (2008) estimate that the programmes in force may have a combined capacity to reach half a billion people in poverty. They also feel that such a scale of the programmes have the potential to significantly reduce global poverty. What makes them different from the earlier poverty alleviation and development programmes is that they are focussed on the poor and the poorest.

The evidence suggests that social protection programmes have the potential to alleviate suffering of a large population in poorer countries in the shorter run, while also contributing to overall human development in the longer run. Moreover, as Barrientos and Hulme (2008: 315) point out, ‘social protection has managed to avoid the ‘silver bullet’ syndrome and naïve replications that characterised social funds and much microfinance in the 1990s’. The current challenge, according to them is to integrate a variety of programmes to address different issues associated with poverty at different levels simultaneously.

References
Barrientos, A. and Hulme, D., 2008. Embedding social protection in the developing world. In:  A. Barrientos and D. Hulme, eds. Social protection for the poor and the poorest: Concepts, policies and politics. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 315- 330.

Basu, K., 2006. Globalization, poverty, and inequality: What is the relationship? What can be done? World Development, 34 (8), 1361-1373.

Breman, J., 2010. India’s social question in a state of denial. Economic and Political Weekly, XLV (23), June 5, 42-46.

Chen, S. and Ravallion, M., 2004. How have the world's poorest fared since the early 1980s? World Bank Research Observer, 19 (Autumn), 141-169.

Dreze, J. and Sen, A., 1991. Public action for social security: Foundations and strategy. In: E. Ahmed, J. Dreze, J. Hills, and A. Sen, eds. Social Security in developing countries. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 3-40.

ILO (International Labour Organisation), 2005. Social protection as a productive factor (GB.294/ESP/4). Geneva, Switzerland: ILO.

Munro, L. T., 2008. Risks, needs and rights: Compatible or contradictory bases for social protection. In: A. Barrientos, and D. Hulme, eds. Social protection for the poor and the poorest: Concepts, policies and politics. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. 27-46.

Panagariya, A., 2008. India: The emerging giant. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Platteau, J. P., 1991. Traditional systems of social security and hunger insurance. In: E. Ahmed, J. Dreze, J. Hills, and A. Sen, eds. Social Security in developing countries. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 112-170.

Sabates-Wheeler, R. and Devereux, S., 2008. Transformative social protection: The currency of social justice. In:  A. Barrientos, and D. Hulme, eds. Social protection for the poor and the poorest: Concepts, policies and politics. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 64-84.

Stiglitz, J., 2002. Globalization and its discontents. New York: Norton & Company.

Topalova, P., 2008. India: Is the rising tide lifting all boats? IMF Working Paper, WP/08/54 [online]. Available at: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2008/wp0854.pdf [Accessed 7 February 2009].

 About the Author: An ex-Indian Civil Servant, Anurag Priyadarshee obtained his PhD from the University of Manchester, UK. He is currently working as Chief Operating officer at International Development Enterprises- India (IDEI). Views expressed in this article are personal.

He can be contacted at: anuragpriyadarshee@yahoo.com, or at following postal address:
Dr. Anurag Priyadarshee
Chief Operating Officer
International Development Enterprises- India
Plot 10, Local Shopping Centre,
Sector 12, Dwarka,
New Delhi- 110078 

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