The Americas Social Security Report 2009

At the CISS we are convinced that some of the most important problems that beset national social security systems will be solved only after a proper focus is given to administrative and organizational issues. Moreover, we believe that in order to improve, any strategy or reform should be subject to evaluation. The Americas Social Security Report 2009 issued by the CISS and recently released in our Annual Assembly presents what we consider the most applicable approaches to the evaluation of social security programs. The key ideas --that are further developed in the Report for pensions, health, child and long term care-- are:

1. The evaluation should respond to the concerns of different perspectives including the economic, actuarial, administrative, fiscal and operation research.
2. The approach should be carefully designed, and all steps needed for the evaluation should be performed: from the identification of stakeholders to the definition of the strategy to disclose results.
3. Evaluation should be performed for systems, agencies and programs. We consider programs to be managed by agencies and systems to be the collection of agencies and programs. Moreover, we insist that it should be recognized that many processes are performed in an agency and that the system of evaluation should be developed accordingly. To read about administrative models of social insurance we invite you to access the The Americas Social Security Report 2008.
4. Evaluation should have as its object of analysis the citizen. Therefore, the use of micro-data should be the norm and all contacts of the individual with the agencies and programs should be recorded in an integrated way.

We invite those interested in this topic to read our annual Report available at www.ciss.org.mx and to attend our conference “Making Impact Evaluations of Social Program Work” to be held February 12 -13, 2009.