More Background

In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the crucial role of unemployment protection schemes in ensuring income security for workers and their families and supporting the unemployed workers to return to work. Unemployment protection programmes are also paramount to support those adversely impacted by technological innovations as well as environmental and climate change, by facilitating structural change and a just transition for enterprises and workers in all sectors.

As one of the branches of social protection schemes, unemployment protection aims at guaranteeing a partial and temporary income replacement in the event of job loss. In addition, the Employment Promotion and Protection against Unemployment Convention, 1988 (No.168) calls the ILO member states to coordinate unemployment protection and employment promotion. To this end, the integrated system of unemployment protection and employment promotion must ensure that unemployed workers protected by the system be supported through employment promotion programmes such as employment services, skills development, and entrepreneurship support measures.

The maturity of unemployment protection in Asia is diverse. For example, East and Southeast Asian countries have unique unemployment protection mechanisms that stand at the different levels of maturity. Looking at the time elapsed since the establishment of unemployment benefits in each country, Japan (1947), the People’s Republic of China (1986) and the Republic of Korea (1995) boast the longest history of implementing comprehensive unemployment insurance schemes in the region; Lao PDR (2001), Thailand (2004), India (2005) and Viet Nam (2009) have been implementing schemes more than ten years and may be in a phase of revising policy designs to improve the schemes; Malaysia (2018), the Philippines (2019) and Indonesia (2022) implemented schemes in recent years; Cambodia and Myanmar (2012) regulated employers’ liabilities on severance pay but no statutory unemployment benefit scheme though despite the fact that the launch of unemployment insurance is contemplated in the Social Security Laws; and Singapore and Brunei have neither statutory unemployment benefit scheme nor employers’ liability scheme.

Similarly, effectiveness of active labour market policies including public employment services and re-skilling training varies considerably across the region. While Japan and the Republic of Korea provide integrated support services to jobseekers, the administrative capacity of implementing such services in most middle- and low-income countries in the region is rather modest. Except handful of countries, many countries do not have unemployment benefits from public schemes, a core of protection for unemployed workers. Even in countries with unemployment benefits, many of them have not established an integrated system of unemployment protection and employment promotion measures.