The great earthquake hit the Nepali capital Katmandu at 11:56, April 25 in local time. Within only half day, Japanese organisations have already started emergency assistance.

It is time for Japan to support those who are affected by the earthquake. We remember March 11, 2011. We all know how hard the earthquake is, and our experts know what will happen next and what people therefore will need. The following is a list of organisations that have announced starting their assistance.

Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) is sending 70 experts departing April 26 from Narita Airport. They will serve in Nepal fro 7 days. The team includes experts from Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The National Police Agency, JICA, rescuers, search and rescue dog handlers,  communication specialists, doctors and field coordinators. Press release is only available in Japanese.

Association of Medical Doctors of Asia (AMDA) and Shapla Neer also announced on SNS that they had started coordination towards their emergency assistance.

Author: Ippei Tsuruga Ippei Tsuruga is the Editor-in-Chief and the founder of The Povertist. He has extensive experience and knowledge in poverty and social protection in Asia and Africa.

Cambodia has social protection at the centre of poverty reduction strategy. The government has tested several designs of social protection instruments for future scale-up. What components or types of social protection programmes most effectively reduce poverty and vulnerability in the country’s context? It is often an important question at the pilot phase to assess impacts on household’s consumption or income. But what about impacts on a local economy?

Levy and Robinson conducted empirical analysis to answer this question. Their findings imply that an effective combination of cash transfers and other public interventions boost more efficiently than cash transfers alone. The followings are some more details.

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Recent studies on social protection commonly assess economic impact of social transfers at the level of households, but few studies analyse impact on local economy. In order to fill a gap, their paper attempts to analyse the potential economic impact that social protection policies might have on an economy. Taking a case study of Cambodia and employing a commutable general equilibrium (CGE) model, it simulates conditional cash transfers (CCT) and unconditional cash transfers (UCT). The model allows analysis of social policy impacts on prices, production, employment, wages and trade in an ex-ante context.

Result shows:

• Cash transfers seem to promote recipient households’ investment in productive assets, which  will potentially reduce their vulnerability in the long run.
• UCTs alone could fail to reduce poverty more than cash transfers themselves.
• CCTs beneft substantially rural labour markets and wages although these impacts are relatively lower than existing empirical estimates. The productivity effect potentially boosts supply and mitigate the risk of price increases in domestic markets and increased trade.
• Combined with productive public investment, cash transfers are less likely to increase domestic market prices.
• Domestic supply is not elastic enough to respond to an increased demand with cash transfers. It theoretically leads to a price increase in goods and services in a local economy. However, productivity improvement from health and education components of CCTs likely eases price effects of cash transfers.
• Combining social protection and rural development policies potentially generate more poverty reduction effect than cash transfers alone.

Reference

Levy, S. and Robinson, S. (2014) Can Cash Transfers Promote the Local Economy? A Case Study for Cambodia.

Author: Ippei Tsuruga Ippei Tsuruga is the Editor-in-Chief and the founder of The Povertist. He has extensive experience and knowledge in poverty and social protection in Asia and Africa.

ASEAN countries are enjoying a rapid economic growth. However, most of them are likely vulnerable to some changes that would happen in the post-2015 era, as increasingly exposed to the global economy, and ageing with a relative lower level of income. The challenges that ASEAN countries will have are what the world has never seen in the history. As ageing, lowering fertility rates, changing family sizes, and shrinking labour force participations, researchers suggest strong social security system is crucial for sustaining economic and political stability.

The latest research discusses a role of pensions or old-age income arrangements as a component of social protection among the region. What will the ASEAN member countries encounter, and how can they cope with those challenges?

The demographic trend suggests that most countries in ASEAN will age at a relatively low income level, except for Thailand and Brunei. The aged population will become double in most countries within such a short time.

In most economies there will be marginal improvements in labour force participation rates in both economic active age groups and those above age 65. The data suggest that there might be different scaling up challenges for each country as the ageing progress differs by country. For instance, Singapore and Malaysia will have additional 1 to 3 million entering retirement, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam will have 5 to 10 million, and Indonesia will have 20 million during the next decades.

That is not only a matter of financing social protection and services for the ageing era, but also implementation capacity. Institutions are not ready yet in terms of labour market, public finance management, infrastructure, and social services for the elderly.

The study also points out a potential blind spot. As the table shows, there is universal legal healthcare coverage in all economies except Indonesia and Vietnam. But the thing is, when it comes to ‘coverage’, it literally means legal coverage but not actual. The figure implies that social security systems do not provide sufficient benefits to individuals as most of health care spending is financed out of pocket.

The paper provides overview of ASEAN’s ageing and surrounding challenges. Having discussed the current and projected trends, it provides some policy implications on pensions and other social services mainly from both socio-economic and political economic perspectives.

Reference

Asher and Zen (2015) Social Protection in ASEAN: Challenges and Initiatives for Post-2015 Vision

Author: Ippei Tsuruga Ippei Tsuruga is the Editor-in-Chief and the founder of The Povertist. He has extensive experience and knowledge in poverty and social protection in Asia and Africa.

New research reveals livelihood strategies in rural Cambodia. Researchers of Bonn University and Cambodia Development Resource Institute (CDRI) conducted a household survey in Stung Treng, a remote province sharing the border with Laos, and released primary findings last month. They aimed to identify rural livelihood strategies for different household clusters, and analyse selected livelihood activities. Their work is valuable because few studies have been examining rural livelihood strategies in terms of food security, poverty and vulnerability. Here is my summary.

At the macro level, major source of vulnerability arises from the structure of agricultural production and trade portfolio, skewed to rice farming. Despite an increase in rice production, rice price in Cambodia is less competitive than neighbouring countries such as Vietnam mainly due to transport and milling costs. Most rice producers are small holders with less than one hector or no formal land titles. Fishery and forestry resources decline due to population growth, commercial enterprise, and so on. This makes rural livelihood impaired.

Stung Treng is a diverse and poor region. The province is mostly covered by forest, but logging and fishing put high pressure on the forest and fishery reserves. The majority of households live in poverty and 85% of them engaged in small scale farming. Literacy rates are as low as 65%. Few households have access to paved roads, basic water/sanitation (18%) and electricity (14%).

The study collected regionally representative data from 600 households in rural areas, which hosted 95,000 people or 17,900 households. Applying cluster analysis and principal component analysis, it identifies five groups with different livelihood strategies. Cluster 3 and 4 are better-off with higher income and consumption linking lower poverty, while the other clusters are poorer.

1. Small scale farmers engaged in low skilled agricultural employment (21%)
2. Natural resource extractors engaged in fishing or logging (44%)
3. Self-employed and cash crop farmers (13%)
4. High skilled wage workers with cropping and livestock (13%)
5. Non-agricultural low skilled wage labourers (9%)

Vulnerability and characteristics are identified for each livelihood strategy. On farming, most households own lands, 2.8 hectors on average, but do not have legal documents for 52% of their plots. That makes farming activities legally insecure. There are 85% of farmers’ households growing rice and consuming 71% of their rice production themselves.

Livestock rearing is another common activity in Stung Treng. Approximately 82% of households own livestock, 52% raise chicken with 14 chickens on average, as minimal investment. Buffalos are raised by 46% of households, and commonly used for ploughing land and owned as asset, followed by pigs raised by 42% for meat, and cattle by 20% for beef. Households tend to own various types of livestock and few of them specialise certain kinds.

Natural resource extraction is a popular activity employed by 77% of households, as Stung Treng is endowed with water and forest resources.

Migration does not play an evident role in Stung Treng, engaged by 6% of individuals, while being more common among young generation. That is partially because the province is far from Phnom Penh.

Moreover, the interviewed households recognise some challenges. Impacts of climate change are raised as a challenge by 99% of households, which affects rain falls, high temperature and strong wind. Human activities also potentially generate a challenge by decreasing trees and wild animals. The households have realised such changes for the past 20 years and expect them remained in the future.

The paper notes that the above analysis would be a starting point for further analysis. Although most people in Stung Treng heavily depend on natural resources thorough farming, fishery, logging and other livelihood strategies, the natural reserves are expected to become more and more limited and vulnerable.

Reference

Buhler et al (2015) Rural Livelihood Strategies in Cambodia: Evidence from a household survey in Stung Treng.

Author: Ippei Tsuruga Ippei Tsuruga is the Editor-in-Chief and the founder of The Povertist. He has extensive experience and knowledge in poverty and social protection in Asia and Africa.