Building an inclusive social protection system in South Africa

Falilou Fall and Andre Steenkamp

No 1620, OECD Economics Department Working Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: South Africa has an incomplete social protection system without a mandatory pension savings scheme. Designing a universal insurance pension system would allow to reduce the important government funded pension grant system and ensure that the old-age population has decent income. Only 40% of employees are contributing to a form of saving-retirement scheme, with often a low pension. Moreover, South Africa has a dual, public and private, health care system. Half of the country’s health-care spending goes to the private sector, which covers only 16% of the population. Moreover, the health care system fails to deliver affordable quality services. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the unequal distribution of health care services between public and private health providers. Around 70% of critical care beds available were in the private health care sector. Finally, the sizeable unconditional cash transfer system though reaching a large share of the population fail to lift many children in the poorest families above the poverty line.

Keywords: Health; Pension; Social Protection; Unemployment Insurance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H51 H55 I13 I18 I38 J32 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-09-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-ias and nep-pbe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1787/e01d1e09-en (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oec:ecoaaa:1620-en

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OECD Economics Department Working Papers from OECD Publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().