Carmelo Mesa-Lego, a world-renowned social welfare specialist, has undertaken a novel approach to understanding how socialist economies operate social security policies. He creatively contrasts two principal models: a socialist-market scheme – marked by the presence of small, median and some large private enterprises, along with the market under a decentralized plan and, despite state regulation, only indicative state planning, which is practised in China and Vietnam – and a centrally planned approach, characterized by dominant, state-owned large firms, as exemplified by Cuba. The book distinguishes the two models with respect to: ownership of the means of production; agrarian reform; the industrialization process; employment, unemployment, and self-employment; and monetary and exchange rate unification. Mesa-Largo presents his study of the implementation of the two paradigms, respectively, by marshalling an unusually impressive wealth of data. The focus is upon contributory pensions, health care and non-contributory social assistance.
The book is rich in every kind of statistic on every programme of welfare for each of the three countries, up to 2022–2023. Mesa-Lago draws upon this data to make his points and for comparative purposes. Drawing upon 20 economic and social indicators, he is able to devise a composite average that ranks the performance of the three. China emerges as the most successful in providing assistance, with Vietnam a close second; Cuba falls far behind these two on almost every measure. There is an irony here that Mesa-Lago reveals: at the start of its conversion to socialism, Cuba was ahead of the other two countries in terms of economic and social development, but they caught up and surpassed it over time. The basis for this judgment is his examination of the financial sustainability, universal coverage, benefit sufficiency, equality of treatment, social solidarity, equity in treating gender, and the efficiency and effectiveness of administrative apparatus of each of the three nations’ programmes as of the recent past. There is also historical information to put the data into context.
Mesa-Lago sets forth three hypotheses to explore and compare these two designs. These are, first, that the Sino-Vietnamese model has performed better than the Cuban one; second, that Cuba developed social security much earlier, faster and more expansively than it could financially support, versus the other two, which developed social security more slowly and where, since economic performance has been more successful, the programmes are more sustainable; and third, that accelerated ageing, which has marked Cuba more than the others, has adversely impacted financial sustainability, though this problem is starting to appear in China as well. Vietnam is not yet faced with the issue of ageing. Using massive figures to elaborate each subcomponent of pensions, health and social assistance, Mesa-Lago discovers that all three of his hypotheses are, indeed, correct.
Among the many interesting facts uncovered by the analysis are these: Cuban pensions do not meet basic food needs, and “the quality of and access to public facilities and personnel have severely deteriorated” there over the years (p. 63); a decade trend (2008–2019) had China and Vietnam showing greater progress than Cuba in all of six indicators of health care, while Cuba experienced a declining trend in them; excess mortality from COVID-19 in Cuba was 82 times that in China and three times that in Vietnam; in 2021 Vietnam’s average social assistance pension amounted to 64 per cent of GDP per capita, while in Cuba the figure was 1.9 per cent; inequalities in welfare appear high in China, with urbanites and employees enjoying far better treatment than rural people and so-called “residents” (the self-employed, gig workers and the unemployed) and among provinces; Cuba’s total contributions to social security are just 19 per cent of salary/income, while this figure in Vietnam is 32 per cent and 36.8 per cent in China. This is the case although Cuba’s social security costs amount to about three times those of China and Vietnam, which accounts for its programmes’ lack of sustainability.
The book closes with speculation as to why Cuba has chosen not to follow the socialist-market pattern operated in China and Vietnam. Mesa-Lago points chiefly to the country’s leadership’s abhorrence of concentration of wealth and income, its concern that liberalization would diminish its own power, and a general political logic that favours central power. He also puts forth a range of suggestions that would improve the operation of social security and its prolongation in each country. Clearly, the study has implications for welfare programmes and the two models of socialism beyond the three cases explored here.
The book’s strength is its compendium of data and its thorough examination of many aspects of welfare and their successes and failures in China, Vietnam and Cuba, as well as its demonstration of Cuba’s shortfalls; it amounts to a sourcebook. But it is a difficult read. There is repetition and scattering of material on many subjects. Pensions, for example, are analysed from various angles multiple times. The suggestions fail to take politics into account and so are impractical, given the nature of the political regimes in each place. Some Chinese names are reversed: for instance, Zheng Gongcheng is cited as if Gongcheng were his surname instead of his given name. “Coverage” is taken to mean that particular benefits are received by beneficiaries, when in fact the term means “eligible,” since rates of “coverage” are usually not fulfilled in practice. Overall, however, this is probably the best work that can be done on the subject, given that the Cuban government does not publish many statistics and not all programmes are genuinely comparable across the three countries.
