Changes in Investment in Social Protection, 2003-2016

Effective social protection systems can help strengthen the resilience of individuals and households to stresses and shocks in several ways. First, they build absorptive capacity for a shock by providing safety nets that allow people to meet their basic needs. Second, social protection systems may be designed to help build anticipatory capacity, including in the context of climate change, if designed to incentivize people to prepare and plan for shocks. They can also help to build adaptive capacity in the long term, if they help to promote sustainable livelihoods through interventions that build people’s ability to earn an income or maintain a solid asset base. As countries in the Asia-Pacific region have grown richer, many have taken steps to expand various aspects of their social protection systems. In most countries, investment in such programmes has generally increased.