External publications

Trends in social protection spending and its effects: evidence from the Harmonized Social Protection Expenditure Database (HASPED)

Burchi, Francesco / Sophia Schubert / Daniele Malerba
External Publications (2025)

published on ssrn.org, 17.11.2025

DOI: https://doi.org/https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5742582
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Social protection is a key instrument to tackle poverty and promote human development. In order to understand and compare countries' commitment to social protection and to conduct empirical analyses to examine the effects as well as the determinants of social protection, it is necessary to focus on public spending in this sector. Most scholars and international organizations rely on a single source of data on social protection expenditures or on multiple sources without any attempt to harmonize the data. In the first case, empirical analyses necessarily make use of data containing a relatively small number of countries and/or years; in the second case, scholars can exploit a larger sample size but one that is composed of data with limited comparability. Against this background, the paper has two objectives. First, it presents the Harmonized Social Protection Expenditure Database (HASPED), a comprehensive, harmonized dataset of social protection expenditure, measured as a percentage of GDP, obtained by combining and harmonizing data from multiple sources. We prioritize data reliability and ensure as much consistency across sources (and government levels) as possible through a systematic process. To do so, we examine the various definitions of social protection adopted by the different organizations providing the data and employ different statistical methodologies to ensure consistent alignment of the data across the different sources. As a result, we were able to generate the largest social protection expenditure database so far (consisting of 4,337 country-year points) while at the same time ensuring high comparability across countries, years, and data sources. The database includes 157 countries in the period 1980-2023. Second, we used the HASPED to analyze country-level trends in social protection spending and to examine the crosscountry relationship between social protection expenditures and different socioeconomic indicators. We find that since 2000, the large majority of countries (76.4%) have increased the share of GDP used for social protection, with the lowest improvements detected in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The exploratory correlation and regression analyses then reveal that a higher share of GDP destined for social protection is associated with higher economic and human development as well as lower (income and multidimensional) poverty, though the effects are not always statistically significant.