The Legacy of Colonialism: The Origins of Social Security in Developing Countries

Social security has been one of the most popular instruments all over the globe to promote human development, political stability and inclusive growth. Social security provides income security in case of sickness, invalidity, old age, unemployment, work injury and maternity in the last 150 years. To date, nearly all countries of the world have implemented some kind of social security legislation. While the formation of the welfare state in the OECD-world has been largely analyzed, we know very little about the emergence of social security systems beyond the OECD-world. In most developing countries the roots of social security can be traced back to colonial times. In this paper, I argue that colonialism is crucial to explain the emergence and development of social security systems in developing countries, a factor that has been almost completely neglected by comparative social policy research so far. I analyze the influence of colonialism on social security systems in 70 British and French former colonies from the beginning of the 20th century until today by mainly relying on quantitative techniques such as event history analyses. The findings support that social security systems in former colonies have been highly influenced by colonial relationships. The effects of colonialism depend on the interplay between the colonizing strategy of the colonial power and the characteristics and interests of the colonized society. For example, social security systems implemented in stratified societies by the British Empire rather ensured small privileged elites high benefit generosity for themselves at the expense of the broad mass in the poor rural areas while France rather attenuated existing social inequalities by providing basic universal benefits.