Social security around the world : a review of datasets

Due to increasing scholarly interest in social policy reforms and processes of policy diffusion, comprehensive datasets on social security systems are all the more necessary. As such, this paper provides an overview of existing datasets on social security and discusses their strengths and shortcomings. The projects presented are appropriate for empirical analyses, including both event history analyses and multivariate regressions. As much of the research on social security systems thus far has mainly focused on OECD countries, this paper takes a closer look on data of the Non-OECD world, which can be used to supplement existing data projects and for the analysis of global social security dynamics.