The Right to Social Security and National Development: Lessons from OECD Experience for Low-Income Countries

Abstract

Mounting acceptance throughout the world of human rights puts pressure on all countries to re-cast development policies and eliminate poverty. This report traces the divergent historical experience in developed and developing countries of putting into practice the fundamental rights to social security, including social insurance, and an adequate standard of living. Attempts to restrain and roll back social security in the last three decades have been made with too little understanding of the accumulating historical impetus in all OECD countries of its elaborate institutions and multiple functions. This report has sought to review that history because of the critical contemporary need to establish an economic and social as well as political consensus about strategy. The report highlights the importance of social security in development policy formulation and provides in this respect some strategic recommendations for both developing and industrialized countries.

Keywords: Social security, social security policy, economic and social rights, standard of living, poverty alleviation, OECD country, developing countries.