This Element presents a rigorous analysis of social protection based on tools and methods developed in public and insurance economics.

The objective of this Element is to provide an analysis of social protection from an economic perspective. It relies on tools and methods widely used in public and insurance economics and comprises four main section besides the introduction. The first section is devoted to the design of social protection programs and their political sustainability. The second section assesses the efficiency and performance of social protection programs, and of the welfare state as a whole. In the third section, the relative merits of social and private insurance are analyzed as well as the design of optimum insurance contract with emphasis on health and pensions. The last section focuses on the implications of asymmetric information that may lead governments to adopt policies that would otherwise be rejected in a perfect information setting.