Development Pathways supported development partners and the Vietnamese Government in its wide-reaching social protection reform process. Continuing this commitment, Development Pathways was commissioned by the ILO to review Vietnam’s social protection expenditures, including proposing a framework for assessing the adequacy of existing tax-financed benefits and offering proposals for improving and protecting their value going forward. Philip James and Shea McClanahan engaged with the ILO and top technical experts from the Government to refine proposals for benefit adequacy and the implications for the Government’s goals for expansion of social protection.
Their work also entailed exploring the evolution and projection of expenditures under the pre-1995 pension regime — which pays tax-financed pensions to people who were state employees prior to 1995 — to assess the potential to free up resources for other social protection commitments. As part of this work, Bjorn Gelders and Shea McClanahan led participatory workshops to train key personnel in the Ministry of Finance.
Read our related work:
Publication: Assessing the potential for multi-tiered child benefits in Viet Nam
Policy Brief: Assessing the potential for multi-tiered child benefits in Viet Nam