Initially developed to monitor the ECA region's response to the 2008 economic and financial crisis, the Social Protection Expenditure and Evaluation Database (SPEED) has existed as a unique tool to comparatively analyze the effectiveness of social protection (SP) systems and to benchmark countries' performance. Further, it is a powerful instrument to assess the readiness of SP systems to respond to crisis and to identify vulnerable groups more exposed to the shock and in need of special measures. SPEED provides easy-to-access indicators, across and within countries for years between 2000 and 2018 for five main groups of SP programs: social assistance, social insurance (pensions), active and passive labor market policies, social care services and general subsidies. Reflecting the source of the data, this website is divided into two parts: – Expenditure data, based on administrative program level data, including information on expenditure levels and numbers of beneficiaries; and Performance, based on household survey data, with information on the characteristics and distribution of beneficiaries and their households.
The expenditure part of SPEED relies on administrative data collected at the program level directly from the government and harmonized across the region. As a part of the harmonization process, programs are divided into the 5 Social Protection categories mentioned above, as well as into two other levels of sub-categories described in the methodology. The data provided includes the yearly executed budget of the national level Social Protection programs, and the total number of beneficiaries of each of them. For the regional comparison of the expenditure data, SPEED uses annual expenditure as a share of GDP.
The performance part of SPEED contains different information about the results of the programs captured by the household surveys. The team makes use of the surveys harmonized by the Poverty Global Practice, identifying the Social Protection programs captured and calculating the different indicators for each of the programs using the software ADePT. The welfare aggregate used is consumption level per capita-- the same used to calculate the World Bank international poverty rates. Most of the indicators are calculated for the total population, as well as subgroups divided by age, gender, quintiles and poverty status. The quintiles and the poverty status are determined using the pre-transfer welfare, calculated by removing the total amount of the Social Assistance transfers from the welfare aggregate. Finally, for the poverty status, SPEED presents 3 different international poverty lines and the bottom post transfer quintile in order to maintain comparability across the region.
SPEED Tableau project allows the users to visualize and download social protection data across years, indicators and countries in Europe and Central Asia. This manual briefly explains how to access the visuals and what options users have in their visualizations.