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In the face of fiscal constraints – or an understandable reluctance of Ministries of Finance to sanction an immediate significant increase in social spending – an option is to begin with a smaller universal scheme and, over time, expand it, but always using the principle of universality to maintain the popularity of the policies and, therefore, the willingness of governments to fund the schemes. [...] In each of the countries we estimate the costs of introducing a universal system of old age, disability and child benefits, since these 3 types of benefits form the bedrock of most universal systems, comprising the highest levels of investment. [...] The values of the transfers provided are, approximately, the average of similar benefits found across low- and middle-income countries, when measured as a percentage of GDP per capita: that is 5 per cent of GDP per capita for the child benefit and 15 per cent of GDP per capita for the old age and disability benefits (based on the value in 2023).13 The transfer values in both nominal (actual) US do. [...] Despite the continuous expansion of the system, the highest costs of the entire universal system up to 2040 are also relatively low, at around 1.2 per cent of GDP in Uganda, around 1.4 per cent in Ghana and Vietnam, and 2 per cent of GDP in India. [...] Another way of examining the impact on household wellbeing of a universal social security system is to estimate the change in consumption across the entire population while taking into account the additional Box 2: Methodology for estimating taxation in the taxation that individuals would pay to simulations used in Figure 3-8 finance the schemes (see Box 2 for the In the simulations in Figure 3-8,.