Measuring and maximising value for money in social protection systems

Abstract

There is a growing global interest in the quality of social protection systems, reflected in the efforts of many governments to establish coordination mechanisms between programmes to counter risks of fragmentation and duplication. From this perspective, a fundamental question is whether a country’s social protection system provides good ‘value for money’: does that country spend the resources allocated for social protection in a way that maximises the achievement of its social protection objectives? This guidance document looks at concepts of value for money for social protection systems, cost-efficiency, cost-effectiveness and key value for money drivers, and examines such issues at the level of national social protection systems rather than individual transfer programmes. In doing so, it goes beyond social transfers to consider briefly other types of social protection, including social insurance and social care services. And it interprets ‘value for money’ in broad terms, going beyond a sole concern with the relationship between costs and outputs/outcomes/impacts for a given set of programmes to examine factors determining the nature of those results and the ‘value’ that they represent into the longer term as systems evolve