Financing Social Protection

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Financing Social Protection is the fourth and concluding course of the specialisation, bringing together the issues that were covered by the previous three courses. It seeks to strike a balance between the introduction of concepts of social protection financing and the reinforcement of technical skills that every policy analyst in social protection should be familiar with and be able to use. The course also builds on the concepts of poverty, inequality, social justice, social development and the need for social protection, the range of social protection interventions and their rationale, as well as the range of existing quantitative costing techniques and impact analysis that were introduced in the preceding courses.

In any society, social transfers account for a substantial part of national income. Large-scale distributive mechanisms should be designed and operated with the utmost care to optimise social, economic, and fiscal outcomes.  How should social protection be financed? Should a given new benefit be funded by taxes, contributions or private payments? Who pays for what in social protection systems? What would be the likely effect of a new scheme or a new benefit on economic performance, the government’s budget, other benefits in the system and income distribution? How can financial management and governance be organised in a way that makes the best use of scarce resources? This course, in line with the previous courses, seeks to provide future financial planners and decision-makers with the tools for good financial, fiscal, and economic governance of national social protection systems.