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security development
The relationship between urbanisation and social indicators is somewhat nore tenuous than that between "proletarianisation" and social security. This may be due in part to the fact that in urban areas of today's developing countries, traditional household enterprises are still effective units for individual security. It is also likely that data on urbanisation leave much to be desired relative to the quality of other data.'
The
It was pointed out earlier that the sequence of contingencies subject to protection by social security had some non-random historical pattern. increasing participation in paid employment, particularly in machine-using factory work, and crowded living in urban milieux produce an early necessity for protection against employment injuries and health hazards. As people live longer in the course of economic development, the problems of the aged force attention on the State. AS resources devoted to social security become larger and more diversified to take care of a larger number of contingencies with increasing coverage and at rising standards, the share of the earlier contingencies like work injuries and public health hazards declines. Statistics of this share are presented in table 3. data suggest an inverse correlation between social security development and the share of the cost of public health and of compensations for work injuries in the total cost of social security benefits. In fact, significant inverse correlation co-efficients are obtained between the share in question and each of the two social security development indicators (-0.58 with the proportion of GNP devoted to social security, and -0.63 with SSPI).
tions is
The
seen from a morally The stage
The conceptual importance of all the above statistically significant correla- that in the countries of Asia and Oceania, social security development is on the whole efficiently responding to the underlying needs that give rise to demand for social security, given the different stages of economic development in which these countries find themselves. The structure, standard and coverage of protection afforded through social security may fall far short of an ideal state as a moral point of view. But social security alone cannot develop into perfect state while all other aspects of life are still highly imperfect. of social security development in Asian and Oceanic countries at least seems to be consistent with the shape of socio-economic realities in these countries. То what extent social security can be improved even if all other things remain constant in any of these countries depends upon the nature of particular needs in particular countries. A commitment to social security leads a country eventually to the frontier of resource constraints
where social security's demand for resources visibly competes with demand for resources by other socio-economic objectives while different contingencies compete for a share in the social security resources. Many Asian countries seen to have reached the frontier of resource constraints in this
sense.
5.
Social security savings and investment
Social security is a response to socio-economic hazards the cost of which exceeds the capability of individual households or of traditional arrangements to finance. In other words, social security is a dependent variable of socio-economic changes. But in recent years, there has been a revolution of expectations about what social security can do and should do as an independent variable acting as a part of the engine for desired socio-economic changes like economic growth. Since conventional growth economics usually considers social security as harmful to economic growth, it takes a tour de force to derive from it an argument that social security can be a promoter of economic growth. In one version of conventional growth economics, there are two proximate causes of economic growth: capital formation and technological progress. The latter term refers to the effects cn output of improvements in the quality and organisation of factors of production
1 Paul Fisher captures the correlations discussed here most succinctly: "The expansion (of social security programmes] results from numerous factors, such as the growth of the population and associated growth of the labour force and the effects of urbanisation and industrialisation, accompanied by a decline in the importance of preindustrialisation forms of assisting the old and the sick." See his "Social security and development planning: some issues" in The Rcle of Social Security in Economic Development, ed. Everett
Kassalov (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1968), Chapter 13, 243.
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