TNAG-0531-FCO40-626-Application-of-International-Labour-Convention-to-Hong-Kong-1975 — Page 160

138

(a)

The scope organisation and institutional structure of the social security scheme

The scope of the proposed measures will, as always, be defined along the five co-ordinates of social security schemes, i.e.

persons protected, contingencies covered, type and level of benefits or services granted, methods of finance and

administration.

The preliminary analysis of social functions and general objectives of social security will help to determine the country's policy regarding the priorities to be given to the Coverage e_of_different social groups. If a decision is taken that a priority attention should be paid to the problems of urban wage earners, the country will favour the development of social insurance schemes proceeding normally by gradual extension of coverage on a geographical and occupational basis. There are many difficulties facing developing countries in setting up social insurance schemes for wage earners but the ways of overcoming them have been studied and extensive international experience and technical collaboration are available to succeed in this task.

The real problem starts when a developing country decides to cover the agricultural population subsisting, to a large extent, on low and irregular wages. In many countries of the Third World considerable effort has been made in recent years towards extending social security protection to rural areas and a great deal of new thinking has gone into developing new and original legal, financial and administrative formulae to meet the requirements of the agricultural sector. The International Labour Office studied the problem of social security protection cf agricultural labour on the occasion of its Sixth Asian Regional Conference (Tokyc, September 1968). It was pointed out on this occasion that it is necessary to differentiate social security provisions for the organised modern agricultural sector from those which are to be applied in the traditional sector. While the coverage of the rural labour force employed, for instance, in the plantations, does not seem to present any special technical difficulties, it may be necessary to seek a new approach to the protection of people living in agricultural villages where basic institutional changes are required, such as change in the land ownership, in the forms of tenancy, in the systems of credit and marketing, and others.2 The nature of protection in this last-mentioned sector must be adapted to the nature of risks which threaten the existence of people living there and this may be done, for instance, through crop insurance schemes such as the one which exists already in Sri Lanka. The most important progress, however, seems to be that it has now become widely realised in the developing countries that "an effective social security policy in these areas is inconceivable without a real improvement in social and economic conditions, a rise in educational levels and development of co-operatives, together with an insurance against natural and other risks affecting rural fro- duction and development",3

Another, and perhaps even more difficult task, will be faced by the developing countries in attempting to cover what has been previously referred to as the "marginal population strata" or people living in what the economists call the "informal sector" of the urban economy, represented, to a large extent, by the small self-employing family enterprise with irregular wage-earning patterns. Needless to say, social protection measures for these sectors of the population would have to apply techniques different from those used in the case of wage earners and those developed for the protection of the peasant. It seems equally obvious that, as suggested above in the case of the agricultural sector, social security protection for these marginal groups would have to be conceived within the context of other social policy measures aimed at an over-all improvement in their working and living conditions.

will

The determination of priorities with regard to Contingencies to be covered again be easier in relation to wage earners than in relation to other social

1 Cf. T.I. Mathew:

"Social Security for the Rural Population in India", and also Lucila Leal de Araujo: "Extension of Social Security to Rural Workers in Mexico", in International Labour

Labour Review, October 1973.

2 See "Social Security in Asia: Trends and Problems", Report II of the Sixth Asian Regional Conference of the ILO, Tokyo, September 1968, pp. 47-48.

3 Ricardo Moles: "Social Security and National Planning" Social Security, op. cit., p. 78.

in The Planning of

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