Sotsiaalvaldkonna eelarve seminari kokkuvõte

HIGH-LEVEL TRIPARTITE SEMINAR ON SOCIAL BUDGETING IN EU ACCESSION COUNTRIES (LARNACA 7/8 November 2003)

CHAIR’S CONLCUSIONS

1. Participants in the Seminar discussed medium-and long-term challenges to financing their social protection systems:

a. Period of accession is associated with a deep restructuring of public finances in the accessing countries so they can make full use of the EU funds available. Meeting the requirements of the Stability and Growth Pact will seriously tighten the public budgets. In the longer-term, ageing will put additional strain on public finances. Sustainability of social protection is closely interlinked with labour market developments and depends too a large extent on effectiveness of employment policies in reaching the targets set in the Lisbon strategy.

b. As social protection expenditure in all the countries consumes a dominating portion of public spending, many policy measures are being proposed and discussed aimed at rationalization of social protection expenditure and its financing. While rationalization is certainly a desired objective as it is a way to make social protection systems and programmes economically and financially sustainable, it should not undermine social adequacy of the benefits and services provided through social protection.

2. The participants agreed that current challenges to social protection financing make it even more important that:

a. Policy makers and social partners look at social protection systems in a comprehensive way and that the decisions with respect to particular programmes take into account potential consequences for the social protection system as a whole, for both its social and economic adequacy;

b. Monitoring sustainability and adequacy of the social protection systems is based on comprehensive, high-quality statistics;

c. There are adequate tools in place enabling reliable short-, medium and long-term financial projections of the social protection schemes as well as of the overall national social protection system.

3. The participants noted that social budgeting, developed by the International Labour Office, is one of the tools available enabling comprehensive approach to social protection financing: it integrates public finance statistics with projection methods allowing to simulate future cost of the national social protection systems and its components under the different demographic, labour market and economic scenarios.

4. The ILO offers its social budgeting methodology to the EU accession countries together with necessary advice and training. The participants in the seminar express their wish to intensify in their countries the development of comprehensive approaches to social protection, including necessary statistical and projection tools and thus welcome the ILO's offer. They particularly support the ILO proposal to build an international tri-partite co-operation network through which experience of the governments and social partners - producers, users and consumers of the social protection financial analytical tools - will be shared.