Thinking Aloud: Volume VI, Issue 4: September 2019

The September 2019 issue of Thinking Aloud focuses on “Social Protection in Bangladesh”. The first page article titled “The Economics of Social Protection” stresses that while most of the developed economies spend a quite high proportion of their GDPs on social protection (15-30%), a large number of developing countries spend very low on social protection. Bangladesh is placed at the bottom list of the countries with a share of as low as only 1.6%. It is important to mention here that with very low spending on social protection, many of the SDGs are highly likely to be unrealised. The second and third pages of this issue present three articles. The article on “Effects of Changing Demographics on Social Protection in Bangladesh” emphasizes that the recent trends in the expansion of the schemes under the social protection budget must be arrested and schemes should be consolidated into the recommended six core clusters based on the life cycle approach or age-specific schemes. The article on “Cost-Benefit Ratio Study on Effects of Social Protection Cash Transfer” highlights that coverage expansion and increased transfer amounts produced large poverty impact compared to the current situation only with the assumption of ‘perfect targeting’. If this assumption were excluded the coverage expansion and increased transfer amount did not yield large gains in terms of poverty reduction. The article on “Long-Term Effect of Livelihood Promotion Types of Social Security Programmes” stresses that graduation programmes perform better when compared to cash transfer programmes especially when considering the indicators which focus on sustainability (i.e. income and expenditure, gross remuneration, engagement in productive activities, level of literacy and use of loans). Therefore, to maintain the extent of long-term impact, more needs to be done beyond social safety nets. The fourth page covers the events that took place in the month of August.