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8. SOCIAL SECURITY PLANNING IN INDUSTRIALISED AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES, WI
WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO ASIA
(by Vladimir Rys)
I.
THE CONCEPT OF SOCIETAL PLANNING
IN HISTORICAL FERSPECTIVEL
1.
The origins of planning in society
The new
Planning means essentially setting out, in advance, a course of action tc be followed in the future. In this sense, planning has formed part of any intelligent government since the early stages of the development of human societies. elements which have appeared in the course of recent decades in the idea of planning are mainly the increase in the number and scope of actions set out in advance, the precision of calculations concerning the resources required to carry them out and the extension of the period of time over which the desired actions are to take place.
The first instances of planning in the above sense were probably related to the survival of the society or of the tribe, e.g. by means of storing food from one harvest to another, in time of war, or during any other emergency. Similarly, an element of planning can be found in most of the old institutionalised functions of the government, e.J. in the collection of taxes which, after all, does not mean anything other than providing resources for future actions, although these may not be specifically known in advance.
In the field of social protection, social assistance represents an early form cf planning il the sense
Providing resources for different types of action related to people in need. With the advent of social insurance, botn the provision cf resources and the granting of benefits are calculated, with the help of actuarial science, with more precision.
This only serves to show that when dealing with planning in contemporary society we are not in the presence of a fundamentally new technique of government based on some recent discoveries of social science; we are simply faced with an improved and technically developed version of a concept as old as mankind itself.
It
may therefore be useful to keep in mind that planning is not a miraculous technique capable of providing a cure for all social ills; consequently, as a tentative device, it must be applied with a good measure of common sense.
2. The origins and problems of economic planning
Most social institutions in modern society stem from multiple origins which have all contributed to shape, in different ways, their development.
The idea of societal planning in modern times emerged as a result of studies by people who wished to understand the changes Western society was undergoing in the course of the nineteenth century. Helped by the concurrent development of econcaic science,
most of these studies attempted to explain human behaviour as well as the development of societies, on the sole basis of economic criteria and considerations. As a result of this, the economic aspect of social development came to be regarded as constituting the proper objective of planning, and for many decades societal planning was identified with economic planning.
Some authors indicate that Marx was not the first theoretician of economic planning and that he was preceded by others in Bismarckian Germany. But it does not See m to make much sense to argue about the origin of this idea; as is often the case, it may have been developed by different thinkers at the same time.
A major part of this paper is based on two lectures delivered to a Symposium organised by the ILC in Dar es Salaam from 1 to 19 October 1973. See "Report on the ILO/NORAD East African Symposium on t
the Relationship of Social Security Social Planning and Economic Development", ILO, Geneva, 1974.
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