In the last decade and particularly since the publication of the Millennium Development Goals, social pensions have captured the interest of those concerned with the well‐being of older people across that large part of the world where formal, contributions‐financed, old‐age benefit systems cover only a minority of the population. International organizations have turned their attention to such schemes and some see them as having a valuable role to play. However, information about what they are and how they work, and about their efficacy in meeting the objectives set for them, is still limited. Learning has been taking place not only in the international organizations but also in the region where they are most prominent – southern Africa. Such learning should be encouraged and the International Social Security Association has a part to play in this learning process.

Observations of policy convergence and the cross‐national diffusion of ideas, knowledge and policies have raised the question about the ways countries might learn from their peers. This article examines the role of cross‐national learning with regard to Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs). We review the spread of this policy instrument and analyse the implementation of DRGs in three late‐adopting countries: Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The three cases show that the implementation of this policy instrument required intense studies, cooperation with stakeholders and adjustment to country‐specific needs. The countries learned from foreign experience, but it was only with the introduction of a regulatory framework for competition between sickness funds that DRGs came fully onto the political agenda. While Germany and Switzerland drew upon foreign DRG models, the Netherlands developed an alternative system to classify patients according to case‐mix.

In this paper we explore the reasons for the apparent convergence in sickness and disability policies across the OECD, asking whether and to what extent policy convergence should be seen as a product of policy learning. We conclude that convergence is the result of policy imitation more than policy learning and that learning (from past mistakes) is more likely within countries than across borders. Given limited evidence on what really “works”, when it comes to designing policies that both provide adequate income security and still encourage labour‐force participation, governments look abroad or to bodies like the OECD for possible models and ideas to underlie a reform. However, translating those ideas into workable policies requires great sensitivity to the institutional and political‐economic context — especially the role of the social partners and the nature of policies in existence. When it comes to policy implementation, such contextual learning may be crucial.

Recently, many developed countries have moved toward comprehensive Long‐Term Care (LTC) systems. Along with the conventional explanations of these policy changes based on domestic factors, learning from abroad should be considered. We focus on the social insurance model of LTC, particularly how Japan learned from Germany and the Republic of Korea learned from Japan. Some approaches for how to think about policy learning in general as well as cross‐border learning are suggested.

The rapid ageing of India's population, in conjunction with migration out of rural areas and the continued concentration of the working population in the informal sector, has highlighted the need for better economic security arrangements for the elderly. Traditional family ties that have been key to ensuring a modicum of such security are beginning to fray, and increased longevity is making care of the elderly more expensive. As a result, the elderly are at increased risk of being poor or falling into poverty. In parallel with its efforts to address this issue, the Government of India and some of the Indian states have initiated an array of programmes for providing some level of access to health care or health insurance to the great majority of Indians who lack sufficient access. Formal-sector workers have greater social security than those in the informal sector, but they only represent a small share of the workforce. Women are particularly vulnerable to economic insecurity. India's experience offers some lessons for other countries. Although there is space for private initiatives in the social security arena, it is clear that most such efforts will need to be tax-financed. The role that private providers can play is substantial, even when most funding comes from public sources, but such activity will face greater challenges as more individuals seek benefits. India has also shown that implementation can often be carried out well by states using central government funds, with a set of advantages and disadvantages that such decentralization brings. Finally, India's experience with implementation can offer guidance on issues such as targeting, the use of information technology in social security systems, and human resource management.

A growing number of countries are developing or reforming pension and health policies in response to population ageing and to enhance the welfare of their citizens. The adoption of different policies by different countries has resulted in several natural experiments. These offer unusual opportunities to examine the effects of varying policies on health and retirement, individual and family behaviour, and well‐being. Realizing these opportunities requires harmonized data‐collection efforts. An increasing number of countries have agreed to provide data harmonized with the Health and Retirement Study in the United States. This article discusses these data sets, including their key parameters of pension and health status, research designs, samples, and response rates. It also discusses the opportunities they offer for cross‐national studies and their implications for policy evaluation and development.

This article focuses on the Russian Federation's demographic crisis and the implications it holds for the ability of the Russian government (or the Russian people through their own efforts) to generate enough funds to provide a reasonable level of old‐age economic security. Although Russia's overall population profile structure stands to be broadly similar to that of other more‐developed societies, both today and in coming decades, the challenges of providing for an ageing population are far more acute for Russia than for typical Member States of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development. One factor that adds significantly to the problem is that working‐age Russians today suffer substantially worse health and higher mortality than residents of other countries at similar — and indeed even at much lower — levels of income. Although the arguments presented focus on pensions, the same factors that will make it difficult to supply adequate pensions also mean that other aspects of social protection will be similarly difficult to fulfil. Successful social security policy for Russia, consequently, will depend upon much more than social programmes alone: it will require the reduction of mortality rates for working‐age individuals, the revitalization of higher education, and fundamental reform of the country's institutions and economic policies.

Upward intergenerational flows — from the working ages to old age — are increasing substantially in the advanced industrialized countries and are much larger than in developing countries. Population ageing is the most important factor leading to this change. Thus, in the absence of a major demographic shift (e.g. a return to high fertility), an increase in upward flows is inevitable. Even so, three other important factors will influence the magnitudes of upward flows. First, labour income varies at older ages due to differences in average age at retirement, productivity, unemployment, and hours worked. Second, the age patterns of consumption at older ages vary primarily due to differences in spending on health. Third, spending on human capital (i.e. spending on child health and education) varies. Human capital spending competes with spending on the elderly, but it also increases the productivity of subsequent generations of workers and the resources available to support consumption in old age. All contemporary societies rely on a variety of institutions and economic mechanisms to shift economic resources from the working ages to the dependent ages — the young and the old. Three institutions dominate intergenerational flows: governments which implement social security, education, and other public transfer programmes; markets which are key to the accumulation of assets (e.g. funded pensions and housing); and families which provide economic support to children in all societies and to the elderly in many. The objectives of this article are, first, to describe how population ageing and other changes influence the direction and magnitude of intergenerational flows; and, second, to contrast the institutional approaches to intergenerational flows as they are practiced around the world. The article relies extensively on National Transfer Accounts (NTA), a system for measuring economic flows across age in a manner consistent with the United Nations' System of National Accounts. These accounts are currently being constructed by research teams located in 33 countries on six continents representing wide variations in the level of development, demographics, and policies regarding intergenerational transfers.

Access to social protection differs widely among international migrants. This article focuses on the issue of earnings‐related contributions to social security programmes and their (frequent) lack of portability across borders — a problem that particularly affects South‐South migrants. Furthermore, attention is drawn to the fact that in many low‐income countries a lack of administrative capacity in the operation of social security programmes is often, in the first instance, a greater problem than the lack of portability of any potential earned rights to cash benefits provided under them. Commonly, the inability of migrants to benefit, both from social security programmes that are in place in the country of origin and in the host country detracts significantly from the well‐being and security of migrants and their families. The article concludes that South‐South migration must be understood as being significantly different from North‐North migration, where social protection issues are much more tractable.

Public‐service employment grew rapidly through the 1970s and early 1980s in the high‐income countries. During this period, the social protection sector was one of the areas that grew most extensively. Many of the public‐service employees hired during these years have retired or are soon to do so. As a consequence, social security administrations across the OECD area are set to lose significant proportions of their current staff across all grades over a relatively short time‐period. Despite calls for a greater use of strategic staff planning and a growing awareness of the challenges presented by an ageing public‐service workforce, public‐service organizations, including social security administrations, have been slow to react. This article addresses the human resource management challenges for social security administrations posed by an ageing public‐sector workforce, outlines proposed policy responses and assesses the difficulties of successfully implementing these in a systematic manner.

Population ageing has been occurring in many countries within Europe, North America and elsewhere for a number of decades. However, recently the pace, size and global reach of such ageing has begun to be recognised, and the wider implications assessed. Population ageing poses a key policy challenge for social security and health care systems across the globe. Different governments will come to these considerations carrying with them contrasting demographic profiles, welfare regimes and institutional structures, and cultural systems. The future success of societies in their efforts to accommodate such demographic change will, to a large extent, rest with the capacity of social security and health care institutions to adapt to an ageing world.

Social security and pension funds were affected on an unparalleled scale by the recent financial crisis. They reported massive unrealized investment losses and their governance mechanisms have been challenged, therefore endangering their financial soundness and questioning their capacity to deliver adequate benefits. The year 2009 ended with financial markets recovering, but also with portfolio reallocations and traditional risk management approaches being revisited. Governments have reacted to the crisis and implemented recovery plans that could issue a warning about the mid‐term fiscal situation. Post‐crisis fiscal stress may generate a trade‐off between a re‐establishment of a sound fiscal situation and a reduction in social expenditure. This article analyses the impact of the crisis on social security and pension funds and address all the aforementioned issues.

To counter the negative social consequences of the present crisis, States must take measures to provide income support and new employment opportunities to affected workers and their families. This article reviews crisis responses in a number of countries with respect to support from unemployment programmes, the branch of social security most directly affected by economic downturn. It also discusses the trade offs that all social security schemes face during economic crises, when revenues from contributions or taxes earmarked to finance programmes fall and expenditures on benefits rise. In turn, concerns about pension policies receive special attention. The article concludes by discussing the initiative, launched by the United Nations, for a global “social protection floor”: to extend, at the very least, basic social protection to the large majority of the world's population who are currently without and who remain vulnerable to all economic and social risks.

The economic crisis has served to remind us that social protection is both a social buffer and an economic stabilizer that cushions the impacts of recession. Social benefits are being used by the countries of the European Union (EU) as well as by the Union itself as part of its recovery plan, to support those negatively effected by the crisis and to boost household consumption, thus providing support for business activities and employment. But the crisis could also represent an opportunity for the EU to strengthen its social protection systems, through seeking inspiration from the basic principles of international social law, to emphasize the legitimacy of high levels of social protection, to encourage upward convergence among the social protection systems of its Member States and to increase budget allocations for social protection.

This article reviews the findings of a major survey conducted in 2009 by the International Social Security Association (ISSA) on the impacts of the financial and economic crisis on social security administrations. The findings reveal that a majority of administrations have been negatively affected in terms of diminished investment returns on social security funds and reduced contribution income and are challenged by increased expenditure on benefits. In spite of all this, the findings indicate that administrations have reacted to the challenges presented in often proactive and innovative ways. However, challenges still remain. In this regard, the most preoccupying include the possibility of a slow economic recovery involving a protracted labour market crisis and the constraints of depleted financial reserves and reduced fiscal latitude.

The global financial crisis has had a devastating effect on poverty levels in developing countries, and the social protection response to date, in the form of social assistance, has been limited, constrained by the weak systems and low coverage of pre‐existing provision. Developing countries have struggled to honour pre‐crisis social protection policy commitments due to declining revenues, and in this context the potential for expanding coverage to assist those further impoverished and the “new poor” are remote. Despite the expansionary fiscal stance adopted by many developing countries, the focus of policy responses to the crisis has been on protecting and stimulating growth. The focus has not been on social protection provision to assist the poor directly. Where social protection interventions have been made they have, in many cases, been limited to ad hoc and often regressive interventions such as generalized food or fuel subsidies, rather than more systemic and pro‐poor interventions. However, there may be some scope for optimism, as the crisis has stimulated a number of initiatives to promote donor coordination and programming coherence, which may result in improvements in the efficiency and impact of future social protection programming.

This article analyses the challenges facing the New Public Service Pension Fund System in Taiwan, China. After less than two decades of operation, this young system is facing financial imbalance and is embroiled in controversy regarding the generosity of its benefits provisions. The article first introduces Taiwan's different systems for old‐age security, with a focus on that for general public‐sector employees. It then addresses the financial challenges facing the general public‐sector pension system, including the rising cost of its benefits for all taxpayers. Finally, a number of possible reform directions are suggested, including lowering benefit levels, making qualifying criteria more stringent, or establishing a new system. With regards to the latter, any proposed new system must seek to satisfy the goal of longer‐term financial soundness while realizing optimal fairness among all stakeholders including taxpayers.

A function of many national social protection systems is to substantially redistribute income. However, the size and nature of social protection programmes are changing. In a number of countries there has been a shift from public towards private social protection arrangements, with the latter substituting for, or complementing, public programmes. Developing earlier work, this present article analyses the redistributive impact on income of public versus private social protection programmes. Using recent data from the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development, we find a strong positive relationship between public social expenditures and income redistribution across countries. For private social expenditures, we find a weak, but statistically significant, negative relationship with the level of redistribution. In countries where a larger share of total social expenditure is accorded to private arrangements there is less income redistribution. We conclude that the choice between the relative weight of public and private provision of social protection affects the redistributive impact of the welfare state.

This article tests the relationship between the ratification of International Labour Organization (ILO) Conventions and the provision of unemployment benefits. Statistical tests focus on two related issues: why countries ratify ILO Conventions on unemployment benefits, and whether ratification influences government spending on unemployment benefits. The main findings are that democracy, region, income, and globalization are the main factors influencing why countries ratify ILO Conventions on unemployment benefits. In turn, the ratification of ILO Conventions is systematically associated with higher spending if countries have ratified more than two Conventions.

This article reports the findings of 13 studies undertaken as part of the International Social Security Association (ISSA) project on “Examining the existing knowledge on coverage extension”. It reviews recent evidence that highlights how cash benefits and health‐care coverage, financed on the basis of contributions or tax revenue or both, can be extended and maintained in low‐, middle‐ and high‐income countries. The article also highlights a number of priority areas and issues for coverage extension, including realizing improved protection for informal‐economy and migrant workers.