 Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to our session on social protection and rethinking social protection systems. We will be discussing issues around social protection globally for the next hour or so and we are very lucky to have a very diverse panel with us here today. We have representatives from the political side. We have Minister Abulif from Morocco who is the Minister of General Affairs and Governance in Morocco, also a Professor of Economics. And we have a Minister Van Quickenborn from Belgium who is the Vice Prime Minister and Minister for Pensions, so two different contexts in terms of democracy at least. From the business side we have Masen Darbasa from Jordan who is the Founder and Chairman of Higma Pharmaceuticals, but also a Senator in the Jordan Parliament, so you're providing us a bridge between politics and the business world as well. And welcome also to Geoffrey Del from Swiss Insurance Group. He is the Regional Chairman for Asia and Pacific, Middle East and Africa and also is in a Global Agenda Council on Insurance. Zurich Insurance, I hope not Swiss. That's another company. Sorry, indeed. Zurich Insurance Group. And finally we have another bridge who is at Jürgen Griezbeck, providing the bridge between business and civil society, a Founder and the CEO for Street Football World, a social entrepreneur from Germany. So we will start with just a brief exploration of the issues of social protection, challenges of social protection that we are having in our own context. We have very different contexts and I think this is a richness for the discussion and we should not get too fixed in the sort of traditional statutory measures. So may I ask Geoffrey Del to start? Okay. So I think as we look at social protection we've got to understand what the challenges are and perhaps simplistically I think dealing with safety nets for those with disabilities and those that are unemployed is something that most economies can deal with. What is worrying is how do we deal with pensions and medical care where both have fundamental drivers that are causing problems. The changing demographic pyramids are putting huge pressures on pensions. The fiscal strains that much of the world is under is putting tension on it and there are real arguments to be looked at as what is the right age for pension? Is it what Bismarck was looking at the last two or three years of a life or is it what much of Western Europe started going to a retirement in the mid 50s and 30 years of relaxed life? Medical care has continued cost inflation issues and the dramatic rise of non-communicable diseases to deal with. Are we able to effectively ration health care? Is that something that makes sense in the societies we work in? Is it ethically sound? If you can't ration how do you keep those costs under control and how do you fund them and with this whole demographic pyramid issue creating immense strains in many countries and we were just talking about Japan. By 2050 Japan will have as many people over 60 as it has under 60. How do you deal with benefits for the aged in a society that's reached that state of balance? Thank you very much. Mr. Darvasar? For somebody working in the pharma sector we're a company that works. We have 7,000 people and social protection for me is looking at instances where we have lack of discipline rule of law like what happened in the Arab Spring. We had employees you can't imagine that didn't have credit cards were not working, there were no banks, there was no monetary instruments for people to survive when the revolution happened in Egypt. We as a company had to really look at our workforce in Egypt how to deal with it and how to start implementing some sort of system that will be able to provide them with daily life. I'm not talking about health care I'm talking about basics of daily life. We're talking about having civil war in Lebanon or in Sudan where you had your employees rifted between two parts where you had patients that you had to get products delivered for. So social protection is not only giving your people equal opportunities, equal chances continuous education, better life, health style, better protection system but is being to empower your network in Sudan or in New Jersey. When you work in both in Sudan, Morocco and New Jersey and you have people working in these three different environments it's very paradox what the systems that you have in the US versus what you have in the MENA. So adapting as an international company to the local needs that you have in every country is what really I believe is the biggest challenge. Plus the very important fact that we work in the Arab world and 60% of the population of the Arab world is still below the age of 21. So that's another challenge that we face going forward. How are we going to create job demand for these people? How are we going to give them equal opportunities? And how are they going to be globally competitive? I always say there's really no difference between a child from Finland or a child from Syria. Both are global people. Both today have the means of interacting with each other very quickly and both are capable of being competitive. So as a company that's diversified like Hikma we have to adapt our systems in order to accommodate the needs of different cultures across the globe I would say in that context. So the role that you are seeing for the companies indeed broader than in a very strict it's broader because when you work in 42 countries and fortunately in the Arab world and I've been working 25 years I've witnessed seven wars. This is something that you don't witness a lot in other parts of the world. So you really have to be adaptive and you have to expect the unexpected. Waking up one day literally finding yourself isolated with no means of communication. No means of monetary financial tools. No means of getting the next day. So how do you adapt to that? I mean when you have a business model you have targets and you have a case where you have patients in a hospital in Beirut during this is a very good example I always say when the Israelis were bombarding Beirut the hospital the biggest hospital had no anesthesia had no antibiotics companies were closed so they called one of our people fortunately they had the cellular phone at that time. We had to go improvise go to the airport get the medicines from the airport without invoices without anything take them ship them to the hospital just to save the day. So this is over and above protecting your social community or protecting the values that you work with. So being adaptive and being local and this is what I believe is a good model in this part of the world you have to be local born companies that can grow and depend on your local community and this is was a very good example during the Arab Spring what happened is that most of the companies we work in whether it was in Libya Tunisia Egypt we were able to rebound in a very quick manner and go back on track because everybody was local so we have to be adaptive and being a local company and but an international company I mean thinking international but acting locally this is what I always say. Thank you very much. Thank you. And what about in in Belgium Minister Van Kuykenborn what do you see the challenges on social protection. Well I think that we are at the heart of Europe and we we face the challenges that Mr. Redal just referred to in a sense that on the demographic side we have a huge problem actually also security systems in Europe were developed in the in the 40s and the 50s of the last century and that was at a time when you had lots of young people at that time seven people working for one retired person today we're at the at the four to one and we will evolve towards two to one and as our social system is based on what we call repetition so the people working today are paying for the retirees at the moment this comes under immense pressure so what I think should happen is that I think the solution to a lot of problems that we're faced to in social protection is a hybrid solution where you need a state supported solution that means that you have to have legal pension system that are given basic pension guarantees to people that's what we have but as the demographic demographic situation is changing consolidating that is the best that we will can do in Belgium and in other countries you'll have to complement that with private sector solutions and that's what we're looking at making group insurance general by subsidizing schemes tax deductions and so on and so if you complement states offered solutions with private sector solutions in the long run I think you can guarantee good a good pension system and that's something that I would like to point to the people from the from the Middle East and Central Asia that is leapfrogging you can learn from our mistakes our first mistake was not having a system adapted to the demographic changes as we are looking at and the second problem or the second the second challenge that we're faced with is that a lot of the pension debt or pension schemes are based on taxes on labor labor is taxed too heavily and if you look at countries like Norway or other countries that earmark their revenues out of oil or gas specifically to building constructing efficient social security systems you can find a solution to that so those two challenges demography and where do you get the revenues are the challenges that we're looking thank you very much a slightly different context in Morocco minister thank you I would like to start out from what mr riddle spoke about at the outset no doubt social protection is multi uh dimensional because such a care protects provides for people against shortage in resources whether at present or in the future hence we have one direction having to do with old age another with accidents another with health care and another with combating poverty so there are several dimensions to social protection and all these issues should be addressed with solutions hence there will be problems having to do with the level these countries have attained we cannot speak of an ideal system that applies to all countries Scandinavian countries are very advanced however African countries still do not have any kind of insurance or social protection hence we believe that some of the protection forms and some of the challenges have to do with the global economic system that is in some kind of a crisis and it is re-examining itself and this impacts developing countries the systems that exist today in the west lead developing countries to raise questions and say how feasible are these systems in the west because they face a crisis today and can we follow their path the challenges in our countries I have also to with the level of urbanization for we still live a situation of migration from the countryside to urban centers and this leads to poor neighborhoods in various cities and difficulties in integrating in social systems in addition the demographic problem the demographic pyramid is also an issue for example if we take the case of Morocco 20 years ago it was five workers to one pensioner now it is a ratio of three to one and this ratio has evolved very rapidly over the last 20 years then the improving the level of life or life expectancy now you have to work 20 years now you have to work for you have a life expectancy of 47 whereas it used to be much lower and this means that the number of those who need health care is higher now the Arab Spring has brought forth new demands and new needs that did not exist in the past and this also increases the level of challenges and the level of the system that Arab countries have to implement the problems that we have today would require a coordinated effort as form of solidarity between those effective and active in civil society and the NGOs who play an important role in our countries and in Morocco in particular and there would be those who care for the needy and those who would care for orphans and would care for them for the whole life cycle and this would be a system that would complement what the state provides it would also relieve the burden on the state thank you very much I think that's got a natural shift then to Mr. Grisbeck and the role of civil society as protection challenges in that forum yeah thank you very much I mean there were already several points mentioned by my fellow panelists here but I'm looking actually at the social protection system from a slightly different angle my experience is based on working with around about a hundred civil society organizations around the world working out of 60 countries and they are dealing with a population that doesn't have access to any kind of system so they are in this sense as we're discussing so far they are not protected at all so social protection for them means community cohesion and a safety net which is based on solidarity within their communities but no access to insurance or safety nets in terms of systems so these might there are probably two levels of work of these organizations one is just mitigating the immediate problem that can be landmines in Cambodia that can be HIV and AIDS in South Africa that can be homelessness or rough sleepers or drug addicts in northern capitals so and the second level is then to have young people work over a longer period of time with their organizations in order to actually build pathways that make opportunities visible to these young people and what some of the opportunities would be access to the systems so what we have experience in some countries let's take England as an example where one of our network members actually works with the government in that case it's the government in order to deliver services to the government which the government is not in a position to offer to this sort of community and it's based on a social revenue and investment model and it's just more efficient as what government could do in this case or if we're looking at the private sector I mean there are now models out there we call them hybrid value chains it's not hybrid necessarily between public and private but it's hybrid between private and civil society so I mean there are opportunities out there and then we would look at social enterprise models and probably I know your company for example in Mexico you have adopted such a model and yeah this is a market I think if I'm not wrong around about 50 million people you are not accessing currently and in profitability terms it would I think represent close to two billion so I think there are opportunities where civil society can play a crucial role thanks very much I think the idea is there that we're coming through from everybody really around kind of flexibility and and kind of reaching beyond the norm and the hybrid models is is very relevant and just I just wanted to this is something that I've been thinking about for a long time now working in Central Asia and specifically in the area of population aging and and social protection and I've been just kind of observing this structural lag so for example in a former Soviet Union where we are now with many of the bilaterals multilaterals designing social protection reforms or new models it seems to me that we are still looking at the models that are stemming from the European model in from a 19th century which is actually very much based on formal and active labor market participation and immobile labor market force and yet certainly in Central Asia just over 20 years in a very short period of time the informal sector has exploded so we are looking at 40% of the people being in the informal sector now not linked to the system they are migrating 20 20% of Kyrgyzstan the Jikistan Moldova are out of the country they're not in a system so the models that require or are not able to respond to the movement and the fluid nature of workforce seem to be out of date and I really wondered if we could if you feel the same if you have seen the same are the systems fit for the world that we are living in both clearly we have the side of the kind of contributory insurance-based side but also the people who have no formal link to anything do and when we talk about rethinking social protection systems how can we take the fast pace of change into consideration and the mobility of people into consideration and there was just a couple of examples that were thinking about this risk perhaps or becoming blind to unchanging possibly institutions I was someone someone just mentioned this to me a couple of days ago that the whole idea of a 40 hour work week was set up in the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 which was the time when women were generally not working so there was somebody at the home looking after the home but yet we are still running the same system the world the work labor force has completely changed and just again going back to Central Asia very specific example migration that was mentioned that has transformed the social cohesion and the family structures has resulted in a very widespread composition of households that only have the old and the young and there's a huge missing middle across the region and yet the social protection mechanisms have not recognized this so in terms of the older care of the grandparent to access support child benefits in a very simple way is often impossible because is it this care arrangement even though so wide has not been recognized because the change has been relatively quick so just a couple of examples that I've been pondering on when it comes to this structural lag and I just wondered if we could with the panelists explore possible solutions or further thoughts that we have on how to how to build how to design models for social protection that are inclusive and inclusive will have to consider those who are out of the system at the moment but also sustainable and is that a fine balance or or is it the challenge with this topic is it's so wide ranging there's so many issues all of us could probably talk for hours on it so I'll try and home in on a couple of issues I think we've already heard a theme out of everybody we heard both from both ministers private and public solutions working together I think one of the key issues is learning from the mistakes of the past we've also got to deal with promises that were made at different times and expectations that come from them the the private sector has a critical part to play and going back to your Central Asian story it's very interesting that people think of Asia itself as being the home of family values and family support in fact a recent set of surveys done by the UN showed that the highest number of people thinking that it is the duty of sons and daughters to look after their parents is actually in Singapore where it is a at only 20% in mainland China only 4% of people think it's the job of sons and daughters to look after their parents so the traditional norms are no longer being followed China has exactly the problem you were talking about of grandparents raising children 50 million children in China today are being raised by the grandparents so we clearly got some mobility issues migration is one of the answers to some of the demographic pyramid issues we have around the world there's cultural resistance to that but controlled immigration is a big part of that solution what we have to deal with is is migration temporary or permanent and the challenges that you raised and which mr. Griesback raised of people that don't fall under safety nets the refugees the illegal immigrants whose duty is it to look after them and do we want even with those that are legal immigrants is there a portability of entitlements i'd suggest portability is a step too far at the moment what we've got to deal with is let's get the safety nets in place and we can worry about portability later if they're well enough off the private sector that's us can help with portability and i just say there's systems to look at like Australia's like Singapore's with retirement benefits where the strain is taken off the more we can get those that are well working with private solutions the more we can free up fiscal solutions to deal with the those that are disabled but also the immigrant minorities and bring them into play so i see the job of my industry as taking as much of the strain as we can off the public sector allowing public sector finances more freedom to deal with the really difficult challenges around portability which i agree is a really substantial question we're mentioning that the private sector might be able to support that what would be a practical way of doing so we've got to sort out some fiscal challenges with it at the moment so portability of pension and medical care is actually quite an expensive thing to deliver at the moment and many countries don't necessarily allow that because of the way their tax breaks or their tax treatment of pension funds is dealt with so i think we know all the issues we know some of the answers but there's a lot of work to be done to create true portability even within the private sector and portability within the public sector is particularly challenging though of course there are some portability examples within the EU both in a positive and a negative sense in terms of residents migrating to better benefits or people taking their pensions with them to cheaper environments to live thank you very much it's very interesting when you talk about the structure of society all of these things see me and you can find ways of working in them i'll give you a very good example in jordan uh not i mean 10 15 years ago overnight overnight the Jordanian population grew by 20 percent when we had the war of Iraq for example and we were faced with a situation where we had 20 percent of our population within one week coming into this country you need the infrastructure you need the schooling system you need the healthcare you need all of this infrastructure so how do you adapt that and uh today i mean last week with the Syrian crisis also we have another influx of syrians coming into jordan and they became they came in the during the middle of the year so the question was for us as a country i mean do you get them in the schooling system what do you do i mean they they it's a different curriculum what do you do how you adapt to them these are practical things in life and most of the people that came into jordan for example were children so they had to go to schools you cannot leave a child for six months without the school so social protection goes beyond the things that you classically uh try to uh define in a well balanced social structure i'll give you another another extreme we as a company we have 7 000 employees like i said we are uh publicly listed in the uk so we have a regulatory issue that we have to conform with and we have a practical issue when the war in libya was there there was no government in libya okay and we had patients on products that are uh life threatening products for immunosuppressants so we had to improvise work through malta ship to libya without any financial controls now immediately the regulatory bodies tell you you have to take a provision because you're selling basically without an invoice you have to take a provision the cfo tells you you cannot do that but by the end of the day it's a human issue do you cut these medicines for people who are living on them or you say sorry guys wait until you get me my letter of credit so these are situations where companies have to interact with the local communities in partnership the other extremity i will give you talking about healthcare insurance in in the arab world the social insurance i mean the the healthcare insurance for an employee costs us around 700 dollars a year in the us it costs us 16 000 dollars a year so you have an employee working your company that has a 16 000 insurance and you have someone in the arab world that has 700 or 800 dollar insurance and you have to be fair and you have to be equal both of them so what are the parameters that you have to work in so in practical this is what i'm trying to say in practical life is very different than what we learn in textbooks and what we try to implement and governments as we are witnessing a very fluid situation at least in our part of the world they have to improvise sometimes on a very regular basis and interact with what's going on in society in order to keep that social protection process going on so it's quite diversified i believe from one system to another in and the deputy prime minister what you were talking about you know in countries like finland or sweden where we have where you have the oil funds that will will give you that safety net in countries like jordan there's no oil there's no water that we have to have another kind of safety net and this is where the private sector comes in by being able to cope with the government in in in getting these alternatives and what the minister talked about you know muslim organizations in the arab world their biggest part of social interaction was the social community network safety so in the 60s and the 70s where muslim brotherhood parties were i mean where parties were banned muslim brotherhood parties were allowed to work in the arab world purely on a social network basis so all the healthcare all the infrastructure safety nets were provided by these when when it hit egypt when it hits jordan and hit morocco the first people that reacted actually were these NGOs it was not the government in many of these places so all of this put together i believe it's a partnership so you cannot say it's the duty of the private sector or the duty of the business sector it's the duty of the community as a whole how they can work together this is a business model i mean a practical sorry not business model a practical model where i see the network can go forward could i also explore a little bit about your experience you're working hikmah is working in mean and has an extraordinary access and experience in very different frameworks countries that all have their local legislations have you seen just have you seen good models basically is there anything in mean that that we could we could learn from what you can learn from is you have to improvise and you have to have your own social network protection really and it's so diversified in the mean and what is basically written on the paper or and what this practice is completely different it's not in mean and other countries i've seen it also but good models basically they end up being bankrupt and i've seen that in in the gcc where the government was taking 100 percent care of everyone then they started taking only care of their locals then they said healthcare must now be done by for the expats by their companies now healthcare has to be done for the expats by their companies for them and their children and they will not give you a work contract unless you have a medical healthcare so as countries deplete their resources they have to go by the end of the day to the private sector so that model of partnership has to go on and companies have to interact with their governments i mean i'll give you a very good example i don't want to go into many details about the pharma industry in certain countries you have to sell at a cost plus or at the cost in order to sustain your business model with governments in these countries and you make your margins in other things so in many countries when we work we really provide some many of the time we provide certain medicines at a zero i mean at zero margins in order to sustain the business model because it's part of your duty to have this sort of social protection for the countries that you work in so it's really i would say companies have to improvise and have to work closely in partnership with the local communities and governments in order to continue the business model in many instances otherwise they will be out thank you very much minister um i'm quick hand born how do you how do you see the solutions perhaps this is the difference between the private sector and government you may not have the measures to be sort of or improvise so much but of course um in other ways the government response can be and should be substantial so what how do you see the way forward what is the architecture for social protection that is sustainable well i think of course i mean many continents many questions uh but um europe at the moment also um is facing huge challenges uh in terms of mobility use you were speaking of migration well actually at the moment we see real migration happening within europe from spats with a lot of unemployment youth unemployment in in spain is over 50 percent in greece it is in italy it's over 30 percent and then you have countries like germany my country where youth unemployment is pretty low so you see a lot of for the first time engineers out of portugal thinking of of migrating of being mobile towards the north of europe and so so but the problem is that at european level we don't have a social protection system we have national systems we have 180 000 pension funds in europe active only 80 80 out of 180 000 have systems that go that go beyond national borders in europe so um we have we were we're faced with a huge problem that is the portability not only in private sector terms but also in public sector terms how can you guarantee uh somebody from out of portugal were coming to work in germany that in terms of social rights everything will be okay especially also on the side of information because a lot of anxiety that exists within modern state so-called modern state has to do with the fact that people do not know what they will get when i go speaking about with pensions i'm a pretty young guy but i go speaking with a lot of youngsters in my country and ask them i'm i'm anxious i'm not sure if i'm going to get the pension then i asked them what are you going to get well the answer is i don't know although that information is available and we're absolutely not transparent the first thing when you're when you're looking for a job the first thing you asked for the second thing is first thing is is it is a funny job and second is what can i earn i mean that's a normal human question nobody asks his question i mean what are what is my pension going to be so that's a question of transparency and the third thing i think is is essential is that we are evolving in europe from what i would call job security towards career security you i mean the idea of having a job for the whole of your life and staying there is gone i mean you have to change the systems that means that education and lifelong lifelong learning will be at most at most important to do so that i would like to come to your remark about the informal economy i'm sorry to be a little bit strict on that but i i i think you need flexible models and and flexible solutions to things but sitting there and say okay we will always be faced with kinds of informal economy i don't agree on that i mean at least you should have social protection offered by the state and it's true the work you're doing is marvelous but i mean i don't want to fall into an ideological twist or fight but i do think that every state every country has the ultimate responsibility to offer minimum social protection provided by the state and if i look at what's happening in the united states with all my due sympathy for the country i love america but i mean they're still fighting about the idea having i mean general health cares for everybody i mean this is this is i mean this is outrageous this should be a modern idea for every country to have health care provided by the state at a certain minimum level and then added to that of course what the private sector can do but never accept the fact that the private sector should be there stay there and that the state should get out of there i mean this is an idea i cannot live with and you're referring to kyrgyzstan where you're working in other countries i mean you should have sorry to say that minimum democratic rights uh social security setup uh governments are responsible for that so i i'm not willing to go into the idea that will always be informal economy have to adapt to that i mean you have response ultimate responsibilities out of the politicians thank you i think the the point that you made about kind of very low pension literacy and just generally social protection literacy is very valid and i think that we did some research on that over over the past couple of years and that does seem to be the problem in also in the countries in central asia for example i'm sure is everywhere people don't know people don't know what is available and they don't know how to find the information and often if the the capacity at the government level is lower people working for the government cannot tell that either so the gap is often often with information rather than willingness yeah and a thing that you see with every human is procrastination especially when you're looking about building up social security rights so you should set the default rights and to say okay you're into a system and and the default should be uh opt out i mean if you want to get out of the system then it's up to you to get out of there so uh it's it's it's an ultimate responsibility for for governments and good administrations to look for their for their people especially when it comes to social security maybe you will see my myself as a socialist i'm not i'm a free market liberal but i've learned a lot from what happened in with the economic crisis in europe and so uh social protection is one of the first responsibilities of of good governments thank you very much mr bruliff um how about you what are your your lessons and thoughts for for longer term sustainable social protection that you are just starting to invest in social protection in marocco and i'm just interested in how do you identify the short term solutions that are acute youth unemployment for example and make sure that those those short term solutions are paving away for a sustainable inclusive model yes thank you i will try to comment on some of the interventions related to the private sector and maybe i will shift the level or carry the level to another level related to the societal and civilizational or urban aspect in social protection number one the sole reliance on private sector in providing social security social protection i think is not sustainable on the medium or long term because the private sector is a commercial profit making a sector but basically mr darwas he talked about the libian problem but this kind of problem could be repeated but we the private sector needs to have sustainability so that there would be innovation etc but there is another aspect that is related to providing at a minimum level of protection that the second problem in marocco and most Islamic countries and mr riddell talked about the china case but for us the cultural and social system provides a coverage large part of what state would provide let me say in tanja my city with inhabitants of more than one million however the elderly homes are only two and they and they're only house some 200 people only in marocco maybe i can say that it is a shame for you want to send your parents to the senior home so nursing homes so and this less at this particular time we don't need the state to have such care to the elderly that is covered by by the family we have some five million marocco's abroad and despite the crisis in the united europe and the united states these transfers have not been framed because some 80 percent of incoming remittances that they send have a social nature they are being sent to the parents and to family members so even if there's a financial crisis in europe and in the west marocco's who make those money transfers they still feel they have duty therefore that they should do this transfer and they lift a very large part of the burden even if that family does not have any social protection by the state and through these money transfers they can cover their needs i think we should not at this particular phase we should not reduce this social this cultural dimension another cultural dimension i'm sure mr darwaz knows it very well is what we call a walk firm walk it's a sound sort of an endowment and this is a method used by the community from its private sector and it enables the state to access several in kind and in cash tools that are used specifically for certain groups for example in the past two centuries there were houses for taking care of cats and one may not one may not imagine such as thing stray cats are taking care of through this endowment or walk for for example in turkey in indonesia other countries are relying such a system and they have shown that they are able to progress another model for us in marocco we rely on certain funds we are not in all rich country however in our partnership with the private sector we were able to have a law and creating a social solidarity fund companies that make more than a certain amount of money for example 200 million dirhams they were committed to present to submit for example 1.5 percent of the profits to this fund and the fund supports certain families or sectors so that we would reduce poverty and the vulnerability and to increase their purchasing power we use such funds in addition to other funds that we call support funds basically supporting the purchasing ability of families that are not socially covered by social protection that would able to maintain meeting the basic needs of housing and food etc this shows that if we gather all those elements of the system together we can have a system let me say that is parallel to that of the current one that is operating maybe at a middle medium level not a very high level maybe it's not 100 coverage especially for us the rural world is still a harm because it is the one that has the least coverage this is a big challenge for us in marocco thank you very much mr grisbeck going back to the to the very large vulnerable uninsured informal population would you be able to offer some some solutions in terms of partnerships i mean i think i mentioned it already in the first statement i i don't see any other solution than collaboration between the three private public and civil society and i very much echo mr davos say with what he said and i two months ago i was in amman i was quite impressed how jordan is kind of dealing with this uncertainty on a daily level i would also echo the deputy prime minister in terms of it is a government responsibility but that does not mean that government has to do everything and i'm back to collaboration with the private and the civil society and i can sing a song about the usa i'm currently living in the usa and i'm rather not going to the doctors because it's just too expensive but i think there is a need to to recognize that over the last probably 20 years there is a new industry that's called social entrepreneurship and social enterprise social business that hasn't been recognized as part of the value chain i would say or part of the let's say delivery of services not only to the vulnerable but to if i mean if our ambition is to to reach 100 coverage and to really deliver services and to everybody then i think this is an industry that hasn't been recognized neither by the private nor by the public and i think there are assets in that industry that is just out of reach for governments and private which is deep knowledge of communities aggregate the demand and and also the the let's say the possibility to change behavior and towards probably then trust in government or these kind of things that are necessary in order to accept then the services of a government and at the end i think it's not only that then the undercovered or let's say the underserved community does does win with the situation i think also for the private it's a profitable way to go and for the government it's a way to go in order to just fulfill the mission of a government so i can see another way that's not called collaboration of the three yeah then why is why is your sector social entrepreneurs why is it not bigger why don't we see more of it i mean it's very young as i said it's just probably 10 to 20 years and really kind of on the map of of of the global community it's i mean that's the Schwab Foundation's efforts and the Ashoka's efforts and those who are identifying these kind of solution solution driven entrepreneurs in terms of serving the the communities and it's just that we haven't yet entered into let's say too many of these successful partnerships that then could go to scale as a model for the partnerships and that needs let's say more approximation of the sectors being at the government in terms of frameworks and allowing social entrepreneurs really to to develop and the private in order to recognize in order to establish and support these industries for their own sake thank you i would um open the floor now unless any of the panelists would like to come back to a comment or open the floor for questions um one here please i'm i'm barbara thomas judge and i'm chairman of the uk pension protection fund and i have a question to ask the um to ask jeff riddle and also the belgian minister i agree that we need to have the state and the and the private sector work together to protect people and in the uk we're trying to have a single state pension and give people an idea of what they will get but the problem that we have in many countries is the pensions crisis is the fact that we promise people defined benefit plans and we cannot afford to pay the promise so what it's happening besides the fact that we're worried about whether we can pay the promise when the time comes is we're shifting the risk to the employees in defined contribution plans so we're giving them some money and then we're saying really you're on your own and that's not working out quite so well people don't really understand what to do with the money and employers aren't being all that helpful so what we're trying to do is find a way between defined benefit and defined contribution where peat where the risk is shared between the employer and the employee in terms of giving people some idea of what they will get at the end of the day but not totally rely on the employer to fund that so I would ask the panel how you think we can do that this is a serious question we are grappling with it right now in the uk of we're calling it to find ambition but we don't quite know what that is what we want to know is how do we keep employees understanding what they get get some kind of minimum benefits but not burdened employers with big pension fund deficits especially a solvency too is trying to apply insurance company regimes to pension funds well I think that first of all it's true that in some countries you've seen like in Holland for example with the financial crisis that that pension allowances shrunk by seven to eight percent so it's true that you need a lot of protection when it comes to asking the private sector to do their deal so therefore I think first of all guarantee a basic pension to everybody as a state responsibility and what we do is the repartition scheme so that people working to get to today are paying for the pensioners of today because that kind of system is well prepared against any financial shocks it's not prepared against demographic shocks and therefore you have to reform the system but it's well it's sustainable against financial shocks when it comes to the private sector and the what I call the additional schemes you we see a lot of shifts indeed from defined benefit to defined contribution because it like you say shares responsibility between employees and employers and in our tax system we've adapted the tax deduction schemes towards that kind of plans so that there is an incentive for employers to look for those to load those schemes the biggest problem that we're facing we're faced with is that huge parts of our society are not participating at that at this moment two additional pension schemes that is most of the time economically pretty weak sectors like textile business restaurant business people working there a lot of women working there so therefore what we are looking at at the moment is to think about generalizing the system asking the private sector to set it up with all kind of guarantees but at the same time obliging thinking of obliging employers to provide their employees with an additional pension scheme because like I said in the beginning the state pension thing is something that you can consolidate by asking people to work longer by closing early retirement schemes but thinking that you can grow that and bring those pension levels towards very high levels is unthinkable because you have to take into account the demographic challenges that we're looking at so it has to come from the private sector but with good guarantees where the responsibility shared by employees and employers and financially incentivized by the government and administration so the challenges are severe you know that to defined benefit schemes fell primarily because the assumptions on longevity and interest rates investment yield were fundamentally flawed and suddenly the risk became much too great for corporations to bear and in many cases they couldn't even guarantee they couldn't even fund what was guaranteed the same time defined contribution brings new risks not least of which people tend to look at it as a lump sum so a they don't understand it but b they want to withdraw it early spend it on something they try to blow the lump sum so you've got to find a way to get a happy medium I think the answer is in reworking the way we do things and how we give certainty we've got to go back to saying what yields and what longevity are we looking at longevity the current assumptions are probably totally wrong we probably need to add four or five years to the current assumptions because the way actuarial science works it gets longevity wrong by definition we need to start almost looking at defined contribution as a contribution to an annuity and start looking at it in an annuity sense and you then get that certainty that people are looking for but it's not a great answer yeah but yeah you can't you can't fix the interest rate problem the only way you fix that is by putting more money in so if the annuity gives too low a yield then there's an employer employee contract issue that has to be resolved but at least you've got a certainty to it do we have more questions from the audience or from from the panel what did you want to add something it's a question it's a question I can probably add some something I wanted when you ask why why the social entrepreneurs or social businesses or social enterprises are not already working more with the with the public and the private I think obviously in in some countries there are all these transparency corruption issues where NGOs try to to avoid and not go too much into and and there is a perception of probably the business that NGOs are not efficient and and they are not kind of playing to the rules and I think that has to be overcome because it's it's not anymore like that probably also the burdens on on on social enterprises in terms of where is your business plan where is your profitability where is your I don't know what talking from let's say a government a government perspective that are often or would be bankrupt in a private space it's it's sometimes a delicate a delicate discussion where I think we just have to come back to to think about what is our common purpose what do we want to achieve together and we have to think about to think let's say beyond our organizational or institutional or national boundaries in order to solve problems if we want to solve poverty if it's only about our bottom line if it's only about my next reelection period then we have a problem but if we want to go for the real challenge in our world if we want to really get to a hundred percent of coverage if we want to really eradicate poverty then then we have to think in a different way all together and it's not anymore our ego or our brand or our nation it's about the problem and do you see movement do you I mean clearly this is a model that is is working do you see that this is it is it's advancing and is taking I think at the end of the day it's a leadership question and I think there is movement yes and on all levels in governments in private and obviously in the in the civil society and there is people coming closer together talking more and more the same language I was talking about insurance companies it's very interesting I remember in the early 2000s when I went to Kazakhstan and at that time we had a meeting with the president it was semi-private government thing and the president of Kazakhstan was saying you know now we want the state to start taking care of all the health care so we're going to socialize not privatize we're going to socialize the health care system at that time in the UK the government was saying we want to get out of the health care system so these were two paradox things if I look today at the network of insurance and safety mechanisms in in the Arab world the average expenditure per person for example on pharmaceuticals is around $24 per person when you go to the US it's $800 in Europe in the UK and in these countries it's in the range of $600 now why it's the same medicine same medicine that you're taking Morocco Sudan or the United States because the business model is quite different the same I'll give you a very good example we export from Saudi Arabia an antibiotic for six cents the other day someone in the US took that same medicine in a hospital in New York for $1.8 the same product we are making margin at eight cents and it's being it reaches the consumer at $1.8 imagine how many layers and layers now why do they do this in the US because they say you have social insurance or we have an insurance company that's taking care of it this is why I said in in the Arab world we pay 800 or 600 per employee while in the States 16,000 because still the insurance mechanism in the Arab world is still very primitive while it's too much complicated and too many layers became in Europe and in the States so if we look at the business model of how many layers we have between the consumer and the producer you can really look and how you can diminish this gap and this is why you have the pharma market for example all of the Arab world is only two percent dollar value it's today we are the Arab world is around 380 million and they spend only two percent of dollar value it's it's very low because the consumer in that part of the world is getting affordable medicines and there is no insurance mechanism that's I'm the chairman of an insurance company no take me wrong so who's paying by the end of the day it's either the state or the insurance or the providers and so going forward we should look at the structure of what will be the relationship between the community and between the private sector in that sense and I believe there are good social entrepreneurs that start something like this in Egypt for example I know a very good group that did that so you can get these models popping up every once in a while but they have to be sustainable this is the problem of the social entrepreneur network they're not sustainable because by the end of the day their business model depends on someone else they're not so sufficient that can go along I mean in the Arab world at least it started like this I mean this is our our experience in that sense thank you I think there's a little bit of danger of blaming the insurance industry too much here but what I'd say is we as a group believe that medical care primary medical care insurance needs to be done in the standalone company the reason being is it's intrinsically political is held hostage to political drives and we think you want to keep the basics of what we do separate from that because the temptation to regulate somebody to cross subsidy is is very high and almost inevitable I think the US is the case study in how not to provide medical care we know that the requirements that are put in place by the politicians on the insurers drive the cost inflation more than the the insurers are trying to make margins rather than be totally benevolent you've got a culture of over medicating because of the incentives to the physicians you've got a culture of ever medicating to avoid liability you've got a culture of second third fourth opinions of surgery even when it's probably not needed because again that gets them away from liability issues and brings rapid income you if you're going to deal with that you've got to get to multiple issues which gets back to can we persuade politicians that healthcare needs to move back to a more basic coverage top-up can be managed in a different way can we persuade the public that they shouldn't be able to get multiple opinions you need to manage standards higher to do that and all of that is in the country where as I think it was minister bullet for perhaps it was you deputy prime minister talked about the fact that universal coverage wasn't even available so I don't think I'm going to be able to solve the US's problems but I don't think insurance is the cause of it I think it's a much bigger social and concept of responsibility and liability issue thank you very much we are we are coming to an end of our session but minister bullet can I have a brief just one word I mean on the sustainability of social entrepreneurs I think some of the entrepreneurs are not and never will be financially sustainability they are socially and others they are very very very sustainable in terms of if we talk about financial bottom lines so I mean we have to look at different models in the social entrepreneurship and social business world and social entrepreneur does not mean that they are less entrepreneurial than business entrepreneurs it's just a different way of looking at the profitability we have two minutes left so I will invite brief interventions from our minister belief and there's a question in the in the audience as well shall we have a question in the audience first and if you complete the session my name is martin cloppers and I'm working at what world economic forum I have a question for mr. fun quick and bone and actually relating to something mr. riddle has said about the longevity and the underestimation I'm a German living in France working in Switzerland and I face actually three different retirement ages as such I'm flabbergasted now with of course the the recent election of president alone who actually reduces retirement age by the lack of say a vision from the european union to align oneself at least to something like a common pension year for members of the european union can you elaborate on that if we are not even able to fix something basic like that how we're going to ever to actually fix something which is a bit more elaborate we have concise um response to that yeah thank you well first of all switzerland has to become that a member of european union but that's uh something else uh but it's true i mean my it's my belief but uh maybe i'm a little bit unrealistic at the moment especially when you're from german but it's my belief that there is only one way out of the european crisis that is you'll you'll have more european solidarity and available i mean for sure because if you want to keep the whole thing together and the euro you'll have to have more integration in terms of controls over the national budgets and at the same time have more european um uh regulation uh i think social protection will be probably after we're speaking about the banking union and the fiscal union and a few years time we're talking about social union social union will come in two phases first phase will be about portability on the public and the private sector and on the second phase will be about regulation but today already you see in the country recommendations that are um um provided for by european commission today you see all already in those recommendations to every individual national country recommendations when it comes to pension age linking to live expectancy and so on so you have a tendency towards convergence but still on a national level the next phase will be coordination on the european level but i absolutely absolutely agree with you that we need more europe for that and when i was referring to the mobility from portugal for to german uh i would have imagined that you were uh not as a portuguese but as a as a german going through france and then ultimately arriving in switzerland also a good example thank you and yet in my level of life and it will be difficult to to have one single age for all these countries from the discussion it is clear that there is a complementarity between the role of the state the private sector and the different social entrepreneur organizations and this leads us to say it is best for the state to provide for the baseline the minimum social protection and the private sector will take up a big part of what remains and what the private sector cannot for certain commercial reasons then uh entrepreneurship social entrepreneurship organizations can step in there is sustainability in the work of these organizations because there is a transformation so if one single organization cannot cover a certain area then another organization will fill in the place but what i believe should happen is to facilitate the work of these organizations government and the private sector should be convinced that there is a need for this third partner thank you i want to thank you for you for summarizing for me i mean it was clear that one of the solutions the clearest solution coming through the discussion was indeed this partnership that we have to step step away from the textbook approach to social protection that civil society business and governments do have to work together as a community in order to provide protection for all of the members of the society not just the poor as you were as you were mentioning and issues like the crisis economic crisis mobility migration which is not going to decrease are going to set us very very different um challenges that are going to require very flexible responses that this kind of community of the three um partners will probably respond best thank you gentlemen and thank you for the audience as well