The third section discusses issues around the extension the coverage of social protection benefits among elderly citizens considering pensions, non-contributory benefits as well as the Singaporean provident fund. Section 2.4 looks at the ADB ’s Social Protection Indicator to glean some insight in the extent to which richer and poorer countries devote resources to social expenditure and whether or not they are able to reach potential beneficiaries. This discussion illustrates the importance of different components of social spending (e.g., social insurance, social assistance, and active labour market programmes), and, the poverty and gender dimensions of distributional impacts of social spending. Still, that is only a third of the OECD average at 21% of GDP. Relatively low prosperity levels in the past, the prevalence of informal employment and small shares of senior populations have so far curbed the growth of social expenditure in most Asian countries.