Social budgeting

Abstract

Complexity of social protection systems, societal importance of their objectives and significance of fiscal resources involved calls for careful coordinated planning and budgeting. Social budgeting involves: (1) a methodologically consistent compilation of the revenues and expenditures of a country’s social protection system, combined with (2) projections of income and expenditure under alternative economic, demographic and policy scenarios. It is a tool for monitoring past, current and future social protection finances and coordinated planning. Social budgeting helps to ensure the necessary fiscal space for social protection, and fiscal sustainability. However, the review of experiences of different countries shows that there still exist many obstacles to the successful implementation of social budgeting, in particular in lower income countries of the Global South. One of the main obstacles is the lack of information and statistical data necessary to allow building comprehensive national social protection statistical accounts as well as projecting them into the future. To overcome this obstacle intensive international cooperative effort is needed which would develop standardised approach to generation, compilation and publication of social protection statistics and at the same time will help to build capacity in all the countries to implement such statistical standards.