Unlike what happened in the late 1990s, when Asian governments severely cut national budgets in reaction to regional financial turmoil, most governments made efforts to maintain or even increase their social spending in the wake of the global economic crisis.12 Measures involved, among others, the strengthening and scaling up of on-going programmes for poverty alleviation, in particular innovative programmes that had been launched recently, that proved successful and could be replicated rapidly and with minimum administrative costs. Both approaches, moreover, build on the common underlying notion that social insurance and social assistance are not just redistributive welfare measures but are integral to economic growth and social development. In other words, they are about investment as much as about consumption.