The impact of social safety net on poverty in our country is negligible, which is the major obstacle to the poverty reduction as the maximum share of the benefit of poor households goes to safety net programmes, a seminar was told.
The aggregate amount of benefit that the poor households get in exchange of labour is pitifully small. Even the small benefit that is on offer is captured mainly by the better-off households, viewed S R Osmani, a professor of University of Ulster, UK, while addressing a session titled “Poverty Reduction Strategies and Policies’’ on the concluding day of the 2_day first Bangladesh Economists’ Forum (BEF) Conference held at a city hotel yesterday.
Osmani was presenting a report titled ‘’Social Protection for All: Learning from Lessons of the Ground’’ while Azizur Rahman Khan, a Professor Emeritus, University of California, chaired the session.
Participation in safety net of disadvantaged households seems to increase the probability of being poor as it increases their household consumption, observed Osmani in his report.
According to the report, the percentage of participant in access to safety net is higher among the disadvantaged groups. The more disadvantaged households are more likely to participate in safety net which led them to the extreme poverty.
In his report, Osmani showed that the impact of safety net assessing three parameters in his presentation. While household consumption increasing with growing participation in safety net, ability to cope with crisis and asset transition decreasing.
He termed three categories of asset transition including “Faller”, “Stayer” and “Mover’’. Access to safety net should increase the probability of being a ‘mover’ and decrease the probability of being a ‘faller’, he added.
Access of participants to safety net among the poverty group, extreme poor is 53.2%, moderate group is 45%, marginally non-poor is 42.5% and well-off 29.3%, according to his presentation report.
He put emphasise on health insurance as health-related shocks are the most pervasive type of shock in rural Bangladesh.
Mustafa Kamal Mujeri, Director General of Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), noted that three areas of transformational change would be critical to manage for Bangladesh including quality of governance, demographic transition and urbanisation and spatial transformation while presententing a report titled ‘’Vision 2030: What Lies Ahead for Bangladesh in a Post-MDGs World’’.
During his presentation Mujeri opined that the future of Bangladesh would depend on the quality with which the country could harness and manage the positive outcomes of those changes.