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Partly because of knowledge about past mistakes of today's developed countries in relation to the security and welfare of their industrial workers and partly because of the "demonstration effect" of the current sophisticated social security technology practised in these countries, the governments of developing countries are sensitive to the social cost of industrialisation. Many have already embarked upon a number of social security schemes. In a study of social security development in nearly 60 countries of the world, both developed and developing, David Collier and Richard E. Messick suggest that developing countries have tended to adopt social security programmes well in advance of the "functional requisites" for such programmes.1 This is because of the diffusion of the ideas and technology of social security among nations in a world where intergovernmental communications and interactions are highly developed. From this it seems to follow that developing countries may be pushing social security programmes closer to the limits of resource constraints than developed countries. This and other hypotheses of nature are explored in the next section.
quantitative
IV.
Differences in social security development in Asia
One useful way of thinking about social security development in various countries is a cross-country comparison of the social security benefit expenditure as a percentage of national income ΟΙ gross national product. This percentage varies from country to country and makes one wonder why some countries devote proportionately more resources to social security than others.
In an article published in July 1969, Peter Kilby and I reviewed the literature on this question and examined various hypotheses advanced in the attempt to explain inter-country differences in the proportion of gross national product devoted to social security in the economically advanced countries of the West.2 Economic factors such as
gross national product per capita and the household propensity to save explained less than a half of the inter-country variances in the proportion of gross national product devoted to social security. Two institutional factors were found to "explain" most of these variances. These were (1) the length and intensity of experience in social security programmes and (2) distance from the centre of Western Europe measured broadly by two or three stages of concentric circles. Of the two, further, the historical factor was more powerful as an explanatory variable. This simply means that at the point of observation (1963, for example) those countries which adopted social security programmes earlier were showing the higher percentages of gross national product devoted to social security, regardless of the level of per capita income ΟΙ the savings ratio. Geographically, these were the Common Market countries. It was neither the United Kingdom, the first country to industrialise in the world, nor the United States, the highest-income country, that showed the highest percentages of gross national product devoted to social security. It was France and Germany, relative latecomers in industrialisation in terms of European history, that were most advanced in the allocation of resources to social security.
To apply the same method of inter-country comparison, I have prepared several relevant indicators for Asian countries of the ECAFE region. The data sources are international statistical yearbooks, but the simultaneous availability of data under all headings is not attained. Information is relatively complete on certain items, while lacking on certain others. Observations on relationships between variables are made below on the basis of shifting numbers of countries with respect to those variables. Nevertheless, certain general tendencies seems to become visible.
S.K. Wadhawan has made available a reasonably comprehensive study of social security development in Asian countries for a broader area than the ECAFE region.3 His conclusion is a convenient starting line for the discussion of certain
1 David Collier and Richard E. Messick, "Functional Prerequisites versus Diffusion: Testing Alternative Explanations of Social Security Adoption" (a paper presented at the 1973 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago) (mineo).
2 Koji Taira and Peter Kilby, "Differences in social security development in selected countries", International Social Security Review, Vol. 22, No. 2 (July 1969), pp. 139-153.
3 S.K. Wadhawan, "Development of social security in Asia and Oceania", International Social Security Review, Vol. 25, No. 4 (1972), pp. 395-424.
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