Towards universal protection for older adults? The expansion of old-age pensions in Latin America

ARZA, CAMILA

Madrid

Conferencia; Conferencia Anual de la Sociedad para el Avance de la Socioeconomía (SASE); 2011

Society for the Advancement of Socioeconomics (SASE)

In Latin America old-age income protection has not been designed as a citizenship right. Pension systems typically followed the social insurance model attaching rights to contribution history which, in largely informal labour markets, produced significant coverage gaps. Workers and families outside the formal labour market lacked protection for the risks of old age, unemployment and sickness, which were typically covered in the social insurance system for formal workers. Over the 1990s, the privatization of pension schemes in a number of countries strengthened the contributory logic of previous systems while simultaneously replacing social insurance with individual savings. In recent years, the limitations of existing arrangements to include the majority of the population have become an issue of concern. As a result, through various institutional designs and contrasting political processes, a number of Latin American countries have initiated a pathway towards the extension of old-age pension rights to the population who were unprotected. This paper studies the process of extending social protection rights in Latin America. It is based on a comparative analysis of institutional legacies and political processes leading to various institutional designs to deal with similar policy problems. Overall the paper discusses the extent to which the new route taken in old-age pension policy can amount to a paradigm change in Latin American social protection from the social insurance paradigm to a new model more closely connected to basic universal rights.