India, The Code on Social Security (2020)
The amendment of September 2020 reforms and consolidates India’s social security laws with the goals to extend social security to all employees and workers either in the organised or unorganised or any other sectors and for matters connected therewith or incidental...
Read MoreIndia, Atal Pension Yojana
The Atal Pension Yojana, which was set up in 2015, targets informal and self-employed workers who do not contribute to any other pension programmes and do not pay income tax. The key feature for this target is the flexibility of the scheme. Contributions can be made monthly, quarterly or...
Read MoreThe State of Social Enterprises in Sri Lanka
This report presents the findings of a recent study on social enterprises in Sri Lanka. The study used a combination of desk research, interviews with expert stakeholders and a survey of social enterprises, which engaged representatives from a diverse range of industries and sectors across the country. For the...
Read MoreSocial Outlook for Asia and the Pacific: Poorly Protected
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...
Read MoreAdolescents with disabilities: Enhancing resilience and delivering inclusive development
Around the world, there are between 93 million and 150 million children and adolescents living with disabilities. Most of those children (80%) live in the global South, where 80% of persons with disabilities live below the poverty line. Children and adolescents with disabilities are far more likely than their...
Read More‘Leaving no one behind’ through enabling climate-resilient economic development in dryland regions
‘Leave no one behind’ is a principle central to achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This policy briefing, based on five years’ research by the PRISE project, puts forward the view that governments, development partners and investors must prioritise investments to tackle poverty and climate vulnerability in dryland...
Read MoreGrowth and Inequality in Pakistan (Volume I)
The theme of the book is Growth and Inequality. These are the two fundamental problems with the economy of the Pakistan. The rate of economic growth has barely touched 5 percent over the last decade. Simultaneously, the economic and social structure have perpetuated high income, wealth and regional disparities....
Read MoreHow Technology Affects Jobs
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...
Read MoreTransformation towards sustainable and resilient societies in Asia and the Pacific
This report takes stock of the changing nature of increasingly complex risks in Asia and the Pacific, and the stresses and shocks that are affecting a diverse region’s prospects for achieving the SDGs. It highlights the effects of selected natural hazards, commodity shocks and pollution shocks on the region’s...
Read MoreIndia Inequality Report 2018: Widening Gaps
In spite of the rising global interest in inequality, emerging economies have not been studied enough, due to the lack of sufficient data and differences in economic and social structures. It is important to measure the extent of inequality to understand the growth trajectories of these economies and the...
Read MoreBasic Income Works!
The Politics of Rights-Based, Transformative Social Policy in South and Southeast Asia
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...
Read MoreAccounting for Income Inequality: empirical evidence from India
This paper decomposes income inequality using the regression-based decomposition technique. The paper analyses the role of education, experience, employment status, industry and their interactions in accounting for differences in income and its inequality in India over the past three decades. The results clearly show that education is the most...
Read MoreMinimum Wage Policies and Their Effects in Developing Countries: a comparative perspective
India was one of the first developing countries to introduce the Minimum Wages Act in 1948 and it is still considered to be an important piece of labour legislation. However, the Act is only applicable to a small proportion of workers. This has resulted in intense academic and policy...
Read MoreUniversal Social Protection Floors: costing estimates and affordability in 57 lower income countries (ESS Working Paper No. 58)
This paper presents the results of costing universal social protection floors in 34 lower middle-income, and 23 low-income countries, consisting of: (i) allowances for all children and all orphans; (ii) maternity benefits for all women with newborns; (iii) benefits for all persons with severe disabilities, and (iv) universal old-age...
Read MoreHealth for All, All for Health: Lessons from the universalization of health care in emerging economies
India stands out among countries with comparable levels of economic development for its rights-based social policies. But rights on paper do not always translate into rights in reality. This case study investigates the genesis of India’s rights-based social policy legislation, its ramifications in the areas of primary education, public...
Read MoreSocial Protection as a Human Right in South Asia
Social protection is variously seen as a right or poverty alleviation mechanism or shield from the vagaries of market. Although Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have brought out various social protection programmes through policies, legislations, constitutional guarantees and so on, their comprehensiveness and implementation remain a challenge....
Read MoreGood practices on Single Window Services: Research on existing Single Window Services around the world (India, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Pakistan) and key lessons to be learned for Cambodia
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...
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