Sustainable and Just Social Protection in Southeast Asia

Poverty remains a continuing crisis in Southeast Asia, regardless of the timing and severity of the global economic crisis. Moreover, being poor and falling into poverty is often beyond an individual's capacity to avoid. Who should help these individuals and how much help should be given — the individuals themselves, their families, their friends, their communities, and/or their governments? A just and financially sustainable social protection system is perhaps an answer to those questions. This paper provides an analytical background for the five articles in this special issue of ASEAN Economic Bulletin, dealing with issues on social protection in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. It discusses what social protection is, reviews an analytical framework of a continuum pioneered by Esping-Anderson (1990), and attempts to locate where the five Southeast Asian countries are in the continuum.