TNAG-0531-FCO40-626-Application-of-International-Labour-Convention-to-Hong-Kong-1975 — Page 153

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societal development, the question to be asked at the outset is not "how Buch of social security can we afford?", but rather, "what social security objectives must be reached within the period of the plan?". No sacrosanct lavs of economic development are likely to be broken in this process, since no one has so far been able to prove that 12, 15 or 20 per cent of the gross national product spent on social security represents the absolute limit to which a country can go without running the risk of economic disaster; these economic limits are mainly based cn convention and the underlying assumptions have never been tested in practice. This does not mean that economic constraints should not play a prominent role in arriving at decisions in this matter; it only means that they should not be given an over- all priority in all planning considerations.

The actual planning procedures at this stage will not differ greatly from those which are applied whenever a new social security measure or a reform of the existing one is introduced by ad hoc legislation. The classical estimates as to the number of potential beneficiaries involved and the financial and administrative implications will have to be worked out in detail.

The decision maker will have a choice of acting through an improvement of general measures likely to affect the bulk of the insured population, or he may prefer to concentrate attention on certain selected target groups, such as old-age pensioners or disabled persons who may require priority attention. These choices, as we have pointed out before, will be political choices in which the planning procedure itself is unlikely to intervene. It will be the planner's task, however, to estimate as closely as possible the likely implications of the proposed measures, not only from the economic point of view, as is now often the case but, above all, from the social point of view, and estimate their influence on other aspects of development.

These measures will normally be prepared with the help of socio-economic models used for general planning; admittedly these models are, for the time being, very imperfect tools in the hands of the planner in view of their limitations, particularly with regard to static and rigid Farameters of social aspects of development. But even when fully developed and adapted to the needs of social planning, they will continue to be a technical aid only and not a substitute for a common sense judgment.

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Among the major issues which will have to be solved by planners in the course this exercise will be the problem of harmonisation between central and regional planning, particularly in the social equipment and social services sector, the problems relating to the integration of sectoral planning within the social security system as a whole and, lastly, co-ordination of social security planning with planning in related sectors of activity. Careful consideration will have to be given to institutional structures involved in the implementation of the plan in order to find out whether they are adaptable enough to provide structural channels for measures representing major innovations in the social security field.

Needless to say, all the above tasks will have to be performed by a planning body well acquainted with problems of the social security sector; whether this body will be part of a central planning agency or will function as an autonomous sectoral unit is of less importance. What matters is that those responsible for the planning of the social security sector have a real knowledge of the field so as to be able to select among the indicators used for social security planning those which are of significance and separate them from those which are not.

4.

Implementation of the plan

In the final stage of the planning process, when ideas and concepts will meet with the hard facts of social reality, the planner will have to consider the question whether the newly introduced measures and the social security system as a whole work as he thought they would. The implementation of the plan will clearly depend on the nature of measures to be carried out.

measures.

It normally takes a long time before the results of interventions into social aspects of development can be observed and this will be particularly true with regard to progress in achieving the social objectives of social security Nevertheless, it should be possible to control, from the initial stages of the plan, whether the administrative structure of the system responds efficiently to the new requirements and whether the premises on which the estimates of the plan were built

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