FIGURE 1 Percent of population receiving transfers from social protection programs
NO TRANSFER SOCIAL INSURANCE SOCIAL SAFETY NETS COMBINATION OF PROGRAMS
EUROPE & CENTRAL ASIA
37 29 20 15
SOUTH ASIA
MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA
LATIN
AMERICA & CARIBBEAN
53 16 22 9
74 6
17 3
67 7
22 4
EAST ASIA & PACIFIC
18 13
AFRICA
76 7
16 2
WORLD
60 9
59 12 21 8
Source: Figure 1 in A. Fiszbein, R. Kanbur, and R. Yemtsov, Social Protection, Poverty and the Post-2015 Agenda. Policy Research Working Paper #6469 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013).
0.75 billion and 1.0 billion people in low and middle income countries are recipients of some form of cash support.11 However, the coverage of social protec- tion is not comprehensive (Figure 1). As the World Social Protection Report 2014/15 notes, “Only 27 per- cent of the global population enjoy access to compre- hensive social security systems, whereas 73 percent are covered partially or not at all.”12 Another esti- mate, using the World Bank’s ASPIRE data set and definitions, is that for developing and transition economies less than half of the population has access to social protection programs, with the number being less than one-third in South Asia and less than one-quarter in Africa south of the Sahara.13 Limited though they are, what is the poverty
impact of social protection transfer programs in developing countries? If we focus on income poverty (because of the availability of data on a comparable
36 SOCIAL PROTECTION AND THE RURAL POOR
cross-country basis), one way to answer this ques- tion is to subtract the monetary value of social protection benefits and recalculate poverty on this basis. Of course this will be an overestimate to the extent that individual responses or other community mechanisms step in to fill the gap. However, to the extent that social protection improves medium-term income prospects through beter handling of risk, this would be an underestimate. With these caveats in mind, and making assumptions to extrapolate from the ASPIRE data set to the global population, it has been estimated that around 150 million peo- ple annually are prevented from falling below the US$1.25 per day poverty line worldwide as a result of existing social protection programs. Focusing on the sum of the gaps between income/consumption and the poverty line, estimates hold that social pro- tection programs eliminate almost half of the total
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