Funding social protection from data after COVID-19: potential contribution of the right to benefit from scientific progress

The paper engages the challenge of expanding social protection after Covid-19 by examining new ideas about funding universal social protection from data. It argues that thinking about the right to benefit from scientific progress (RBSP) in the digital age can have important implications for articulating and understanding the economic fairness issue in the wealth accumulation of Big Tech through Big Data. The paper introduces the need for rebuilding social protection by discussing how the socio-economic crisis brought by COVID-19 put a spotlight on social protection. It then surveys and examines policy-relevant literature that proposes feasible measures for radically expanding social protection post-pandemic, highlighting specifically novel measures that call for taxation of data to fund expanded social protection. The paper then discusses how a human rights approach based on RBSP extends the human rights argument for social protection floors and tax reform. It concludes that RBSP can help articulate novel measures for funding social protection from data.