Interest in social enterprises in Indonesia is growing alongside increased emphasis on entrepreneurship in general. This is evident in the growing number of events, research, and government activities focused on social enterprise. The concept of social enterprise was formally acknowledged for the first time by the Government of Indonesia...

The Social Outlook for Asia and the Pacific lays out new arguments and evidence for the critical and urgent need to increase investment in people, particularly in social protection. Developing countries in Asia and the Pacific only spend about 3.7 per cent of GDP on social protection, compared to...

Knowing how climate hazards affect people’s resilience over time is crucial in designing more effective development and humanitarian interventions. This is particularly important in post-disaster contexts, where people’s livelihood opportunities and wellbeing changes rapidly during the long road to recovery. Yet, to date, our knowledge of resilience is largely...

As ever more policy-makers, governments and organisations turn to the gig economy and digital labour as an economic development strategy to bring jobs to places that need them, it becomes important to understand better how this might influence the livelihoods of workers. Drawing on a multi-year study with digital...

Developing Asia is forecast to expand by 6 percent in 2018, and by 5.9 percent in 2019. Excluding Asia’s high-income newly industrialized economies, growth should reach 6.5 percent in 2018 and 6.4 percent in 2019. With oil prices edging up and robust consumer demand continuing, inflation is poised to pick up...

ASEAN countries have committed themselves to the implementation of two parallel but interrelated processes: the ASEAN Community Vision 2025 (ASEAN Vision 2025) and the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2030 Agenda). From the outset ASEAN Member States underlined the complementarity of these two agendas in their efforts...

A key normative principle of transformative social policy is that it is rights-based. This implies that it be universal, as a right extended categorically to all persons in a defined situation, or to all citizens, or, in its most radical form, as applicable to all residents regardless of citizenship...

In recent years, an increasing number of regional and bilateral trade agreements have emerged that include provisions on labor standards. The claimed purpose of these labor provisions is to improve working conditions in developing and emerging economies. However, little is known about whether such provisions actually do impact working...

In this PSA, several Timorese people speak about the importance of social protection in their lives and how their quality of life has...

This unemployment protection guide covers knowledge, expertise and instruments that were developed through technical assistance to ASEAN countries provided by the ILO/Japan Project, Promoting and Building Social Protection in Asia. It can be used also as a toolkit by policy-makers to conduct feasibility studies for the design of unemployment...

Despite being one of the youngest and poorest countries of the region, Timor-Leste has offered a universal social pension to its senior citizens and persons with disabilities since 2008. Almost all persons above 60 years and about one in five persons with disabilities participate in the scheme. The pensions...

The paper sets out the strengths and weaknesses of the current national social protection system and shows that, if Vietnam were to adopt a more inclusive life cycle social protection system – at a cost, initially of no more than 1% of GDP – the reforms would have significant...

Various processes have swept over Southeast Asia in the last four decades, producing pressures not only in the economic but also in the political and social milieus. When these processes congealed, transnational social movements (TSMs), which earlier had not paid much attention to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations...

Social protection is now widely accepted as encompassing a set of programmes designed to assist individuals and households in maintaining basic consumption and living standards when confronted by a range of contingencies across the life course (including ill-health, unemployment and old age). While often considered a luxury available only...

This paper focuses on the analysis of experience in creating fiscal space for the extension of social protection. It presents the results of studies conducted in eight developing countries (Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Costa Rica, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Thailand) that successfully extended social protection including floors for national...

The aim of this research is to identify good and bad practices of Single Window Services around the world, by looking at the experiences of countries where these services are already in place. Link to Word...

In recent years, there has been greater focus on coordinating and harmonising systems for social protection, which  has led to growing interest in and pressure on exploring ways to integrate data and better handle information management across social protection programs. This paper aims to resolve some confusion by discussing the advantages...