Strengthening social protection for ASEAN migrant workers through social security agreements
Looks at specific actions that ASEAN countries can take to strengthening the social protection of migrant workers within the region. Argues for the importance of agreements between countries to coordinate their social security systems in order to ensure that migrant workers and their families have access to the programs of the countries in which they are working.
Social Protection for Migrants: The Challenges of Delivery in the Context of Changing Migration Flows
Access to social protection differs widely among international migrants. This article focuses on the issue of earnings-related contributions to social security programmes and their (frequent) lack of portability across borders — a problem that particularly affects South-South migrants. Furthermore, attention is drawn to the fact that in many low-income countries a lack of administrative capacity in the operation of social security programmes is often, in the first instance, a greater problem than the lack of portability of any potential earned rights to cash benefits provided under them. Commonly, the inability of migrants to benefit, both from social security programmes that are in place in the country of origin and in the host country detracts significantly from the well-being and security of migrants and their families. The article concludes that South-South migration must be understood as being significantly different from North-North migration, where social protection issues are much more tractable.
European Neutrality in Historical Perspective
This chapter places the neutrality policies of the established European neutral states—Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland—in historical context. It explores the origins of neutrality in the idea of non-belligerency in war and the history of neutrality in modern European international politics, highlighting the way in which quite a wide variety of states were or sought to be neutral at various points in the nineteenth century or the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter then shows how the Cold War division of Europe resulted in Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland (along with Yugoslavia) emerging as a distinctive neutral group of states between the two blocs. The chapter also reviews how the European neutral states’ foreign and security policies have adapted since the end of the Cold War. It finishes with some conclusions about neutrality in general and the neutrality of the established European neutral states in particular.