Share of population covered by social protection

Coverage of social protection and labor programs (SPL) shows the percentage of population participating in social insurance, social safety net, and unemployment benefits and active labor market programs. Estimates include both direct and indirect beneficiaries.

Aggregation method:

Weighted average

Statistical concept and methodology:

Methodology: ASPIRE performance indicators are generally based on national representative household surveys (except for Argentina where the survey is only urban representative) including household income expenditure/budget surveys, Living Standard Measurement Surveys (LSMS), Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICs), Surveys on Income and Living Conditions (SILCs), and Welfare Monitoring Surveys. Efforts are made to ensure that welfare aggregates (either income or consumption per capita) used to rank households are those harmonized by World Bank regional poverty teams and are up-to-date. Statistical concept(s): Population Coverage Rate

Development relevance:

By harmonizing survey data for 129 countries, ASPIRE aims to meet the increasing demand on comparable and up-to-date SPL data from policymakers, practitioners and other country stakeholders, World Bank staff, other development organizations, researchers and civil society.

In summary, ASPIRE indicators based on household surveys are useful for:

Benchmarking SPL programs and systems performance in terms of overall coverage, benefit incidence, adequacy of benefits, impact on poverty and inequality, benefit-cost ratios as well as programs overlaps and spending. These indicators are provided by program type, by extreme poor, poor and non-poor, by quintiles of (before and after-transfer) welfare distribution, and by urban/rural geographical areas.

Complementing administrative data on SPL programs and systems collected through countries’ Management Information Systems for a broader analysis.

Providing a description of country SPL systems based on nationally representative household surveys (with related caveats) and on information directly collected from beneficiaries.

Limitations and exceptions:

When interpreting ASPIRE performance indicators based on household surveys, it is important to note that the extent to which information on specific transfers and programs is captured in the household surveys can vary a lot across countries. Moreover, household surveys do not capture the universe of social protection programs in the country, in best practice cases just the largest programs. As a consequence, ASPIRE indicators are not fully comparable across program categories and countries; however, they provide approximate measures of social protection systems performance. In addition, there may be cases where ASPIRE performance indicators differ from official WB country reports as ASPIRE indicators are based on a first level analysis of original survey data and unified methodology that does not necessarily reflect country-specific knowledge and in depth country analysis relying on administrative program level data and/or imputations.