Reconfiguring old age pensions in Latin America: A departure from the contributory paradigm

ARZA, CAMILA

Chicago

Congreso; XXXII International Congress, Latin American Studies Association (LASA); 2014

Latin American Studies Association (LASA)

Old-age pension systems in Latin America have followed the social insurance model attaching pension rights to workers´ contribution histories. However, in largely informal labour markets these pension arrangements produced significant coverage gaps. Workers and families outside the formal labour market lacked the protection for the risks of old age, widowhood and disability that formal workers had. Pension reforms establishing individual accounts in a number of Latin American countries did little to solve the problem. Coverage gaps remained and in some cases widened. However, using diverse institutional designs, a number of Latin American countries have also more recently promoted the extension of old-age pension coverage with the creation of new "solidarity" pillars, the expansion of existing ones, or the recourse to short term programs to incorporate "outsiders". This paper studies this process in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil, and evaluates how the recent expansion of non-contributory or semi-contributory pensions has reconfigured the structure of old-age protection. It discusses how the processes leading to these policies differ from structural pension reforms in the previous decades and the extent to which these policies signal a pathway towards universalism in the region.