# 1. Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred a massive wave of social protection responses across the globe. By January 2022, about 3,800 social protection and labor measures had been announced or implemented in 223 countries to help people cope with the economic downturn caused by the health emergency and the ensuing public health containment measures (Gentilini et al. 2020), amounting to 2 percent of countries’ GDP on average.<sup>2</sup> Cash and food transfers, pension withdrawals, extended unemployment benefits, wage subsidies, and work sharing arrangements are some of the most common policy instruments governments deployed in an effort to reach different groups that were affected by the pandemic, from formal sector workers to poor and vulnerable individuals who do not work or were active in the informal sector.

Increasingly, studies are assessing the adequacy and impacts of these emergency social protection measures, but so far little is known about their efficiency.<sup>3</sup> Namely, there has been scant debate about whether the responses deployed to counter the pandemic-induced crisis were the most appropriate and cost-effective, although new evidence suggests there were considerable inefficiencies within specific programs.<sup>4</sup> Some evidence is also beginning to emerge on the effectiveness of different program designs. For example, Demirgüç-Kunt et al (2022) classify social protection measures into those that protected jobs as compared with those that protected household or individual income. The authors argue that job protection measures in Europe and Central Asia resulted in higher employment, less inactivity and lower poverty, in the short run, in countries with weaker pre-pandemic social insurance systems. However, while such analysis begins to provide insights that can be used to inform a response to a future large-scale pandemic, there is a need to develop a response framework that explains these differential effects and covers various types of shocks.

The lack of knowledge about an optimal social protection response to shocks extends beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. The literature on shock-responsive and Adaptive Social Protection (ASP) has mainly focused on operational features to enable a response through social protection programs to various types of shocks, such as setting out program procedures in advance (assessment, enrollment, payments, etc.), prepositioning financing to fund an increase in program size, and the use of social registries or geolocation to identify affected populations for program support (Bowen et al. 2020; O’Brien et al. 2018). Beyond the focus on building the capacity of a social protection program and its delivery systems to respond to future shocks, in countries with more robust social protection systems lies the question of

> 2 Globally, social assistance makes up 61 percent of these response measures, followed by supply-side labor market programs (20 percent) and social insurance (19 percent).

> 3 Reviews of the social assistance response to the COVID-19 pandemic mostly examine the target population, coverage rates, adequacy of benefits and speed of the response and highlight gaps in coverage and weaknesses in delivery systems. See for example Bastagli and Lowe (2021). Gentilini (2022) also discusses trends within the global cash transfers response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

> 4 Autor et al. (2022), for instance, look at the “Paycheck Protection Program” in the US and find that while the program was deployed swiftly and had widespread take-up, its lack of targeting implied that only 23-34 percent of the spending went to workers who would have lost their jobs otherwise: similar results may thus have been obtained at a fraction of the cost.

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