ifpri.org (2022) Numerous studies that draw extensively on rigorous impact evaluations have documented substantial short-term impacts of social protection programs, especially cash and in-kind social assistance, on food security and asset formation, as well as on education, health, and dietary diversity. However, evidence on the impact of social protection systems designed to sustainably reduce poverty by responding to large-scale shocks is more limited. 

ilo.org (June 2022) This regional companion report is intended to complement the ILO’s World Social Protection Report 2020–22. It includes a section summarizing the status of social protection worldwide, followed by a section highlighting key social protection developments, challenges and priorities for this region from a life-cycle perspective.

Asian Development Bank (June 2022) The report, part of a GIZ-ADB collaboration, reviews trends in social protection and recent pandemic responses. It discusses how artificial intelligence (AI) tools can fit into the social protection delivery chain. It reviews the functioning of the delivery chain during the pandemic to identify gaps in social protection systems along with emerging solutions that draw on digital technology. The report includes four case studies and suggests steps policymakers could take to foster an enabling environment for the use of AI in social protection.

ZEF Discussion Paper (2022) This paper examines whether social protection – in the form of existing social assistance programmes – affects measures of household well-being such as poverty, food security and costly risk-coping behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using primary data from nationally representative, in-person surveys in Kenya allows the exploration of the impacts of major social assistance programmes. Our analysis employs the doubly robust difference-in-differences approach to estimate the impacts of social assistance programmes on common measures of household welfare.

International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth (IPC-IG) (April 2022) This Policy Research Brief analyses how digitalisation can facilitate rural populations’ access to effective and adequate social protection and economic inclusion in Latin America and the Caribbean. It investigates the region’s social protection response to COVID-19 and highlights three good practices in providing digitalised social protection to vulnerable rural populations during the crisis.

Asian Development Bank (May 2022) This report shares insights on capacity building for long-term care in six countries at different stages of population aging: Indonesia, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tonga, and Viet Nam. It explores these countries’ long-term care systems and their particular circumstances and challenges. It also examines what they have in common and highlights good practices that may be helpful to other countries facing similar issues.

Economic Research Forum (ERF) (February 2022) This policy brief assesses the impact of COVID-19 on Middle East and North Africa (MENA) labor markets through June 2021. We use data from the four waves of the ERF COVID-19 MENA monitor household surveys, spanning November 2020, February 2021, April 2021, and June 2021. We focus on Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia and developments between February 2021 and June 2021.

developmentpathways.co.uk (2022)  The report builds on our previous research with ITUC, showing the economic benefits of social protection by examining the different financing options that states have at their disposal in order to strengthen and extend their social protection systems. The study simulates the effects of different tax financing scenarios for social protection on household income, employment and overall GDP. We carried out computable general equilibrium analysis for Bangladesh, Colombia, Costa Rica, Georgia, Ghana, India, Rwanda and Serbia.

brookings.edu (27.05.2022) The COVID-19 recession was born out of a public health threat. Thus, unemployment insurance (UI) was meant to insure people against income losses associated not just with involuntary job loss, as in a usual recession, but also with the choice not to work due to the public health risk.

oecd.org (March 2022) This document provides an update on the use of job retention (JR) schemes during the COVID-19 crisis until the end of 2021 and takes stock of the different strategies employed by OECD governments to adjust them as the crisis evolved. It provides three key insights. First, since reaching a peak of 20% of employment in April/May 2020 on average across OECD countries, the use of JR support has declined to 1.3% in November/December 2021.