PhD Defense: Afrika Ndongozi Nsabimana

Quatre essais sur la soutenabilité financière des systèmes de protection sociale des pays africains et d’Amérique latine

Jury

Jean-François Brun, Associate Professor-HDR, Université Clermont Auvergne
Adama Diaw, Professor, Université Gaston Berger (Sénégal)
Marc Raffinot, Associate Professor-HDR, Université Paris-Dauphine
Pascale Phelinas, Research Director, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement

Résumé

Our PhD thesis aims to study the main factors that can influence the sustainable financing of social protection. It is carried out in a context of the willingness of developed as well as developing countries to achieve universal social protection-aim highlighted in the Sustainable Development Goals- without jeopardizing the budget balance.

There are studies dealing with this subject that have been realized in the literature. However, they still remain few concerning developing countries notably those on the effect of tax revenues on the social protection financing and on gender inequalities. Our PhD thesis allows us to further the subject by focusing on African and Latin American countries, by using more recent data, by conducting an econometric analysis at an aggregated and disaggregated level of certain explanatory variables and by doing country case studies of South Africa, Uruguay, and Peru.

The PhD thesis is constituted of four chapters. The first two deal with the effect of tax revenues on the social protection financing proxied by public expenditures in social protection. Chapter 1 covers 30 African and Latin American countries over the period 2000-2010 and Chapter 2, 9 provinces of South Africa over the period 2002-2017. In both cases, the econometric panel analysis shows that aggregated tax revenues do not have a significant effect on public expenditures in social protection. The results obtained in chapter 1 show that it is “non resource” tax revenues that have a positive and significant effect. Those obtained in chapter 2 show that it is national transfers to provinces that have a positive and significant effect. In particular, it has been observed that it is the Provincial Equity Share component of national transfers that has a positive and significant effect.

Chapter 3 deals with the effect of working in the informal sector on access to the main components of social protection in the presence of a policy measure “monotributo” in Uruguay for the year 2013.Using a logistic regression model, the results enable us to see that despite the policy measure “monotributo” put in place; the coverage gap between informal sector workers and those of the formal sector remains significant.

Chapter 4 is an economic and gender analysis of the pension coverage in Peru, South Africa, and Uruguay over the period 2008-2018.The results of this analysis show that there are indeed gender inequalities in terms of the participation in contributions to a pension system. However, there is no systematic link with gender inequalities observed on the labor market.

As a result of this work, we recommend that governments of developing countries increase their efforts to mobilize domestic resources to achieve sustainable financing of social protection systems. They are encouraged to pursue ongoing reforms of the tax system to make it more efficient and proceed to efficient allocation of tax revenues to development policies including social protection. They are also encouraged to reform the system of information to improve the monitoring of the collection of taxes and their use and to put in place incentive measures to pay taxes.

As the country case study of South Africa shows, it is necessary for governments to increase national transfers to provinces, which should also obtain more tax collection power.

Finally, governments are encouraged to implement more inclusive social protection policies such as “monotributo” already present in certain Latin American countries among which Uruguay, urban planning programs in cohesion with social protection, improvement of the quality of education as well as measures promoting the continuity of women's work once they are married and become mothers.

Mots-clés

Universal Social Protection, Social protection financing, financial sustainability, tax revenues, national transfers, informal sector, gender, Sustainable Development Goals, Developing countries, Africa, Latin America, South Africa, Peru, Uruguay.

theses.fr/en/s181543