Welfare Poverty And Development In Latin America

The book analyzes the social consequences of recent development strategies in Latin America. The volume introduces readers to official strategies, private initiatives and individual responses to issues of welfare and poverty during the twentieth century. These issues are addressed from several disciplines. A substantial introduction is followed by a wide range of case-studies, including Pinochet's Chile, the Haiti of the Duvaliers and Nicaragua under the somocistas and sandinistas, as well as Brazil, Mexico, the Argentine, Cuba and Colombia.

Social protection serves as an important development tool, helping to alleviate deprivation, reduce social risks, raise household income and develop human capital. This book brings together an interdisciplinary team of international experts to analyse social protection systems and welfare regimes across contemporary Latin America. The book starts with a section tracking the expansion of social assistance and social insurance in Latin America through the state-led development era, the neoliberal era and the pink-tide. The second section explores the role played by local and external actors modelling social policy in the region. The third and final section addresses a variety of contemporary debates and challenges around social protection and welfare in the region, such as gender roles and the empowerment of CCT beneficiaries, and welfare provision for rural outsiders. The book touches on key topics such as conditional cash transfer programmes, trade union inclusionary strategies, transnational social policy, state-led versus market-led welfare provision, explanatory factors in the emerging dualism of social protection institutions, social citizenship rights as a consequence of changing social policy architecture and different poverty reduction strategies. This interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to economists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians working on social protection in Latin America, or interested in welfare systems in the global south.

This book explores the scope of reforms and changes in the social protection systems in Latin America that have started at the beginning of the 21st century. It describes how and to what extent changes in social protection systems and social policies have occurred in the region in recent decades. Taking a comparative approach, the volume identifies the triggers for the transformations and how such pressures are received by the welfare regime, or a specific policy sector, to finally yield a given type of reform. The analysis is characterized by the presence of certain factors that explain the development of social protection systems in Latin America, such as economic growth, the consolidation of democratic political regimes, and the region’s Left Turns. The book also examines to what extent common challenges and processes induced by international institutions have led to convergence among countries or welfare regimes, or whether each maintains its own identity.

This volume provides a wide-ranging analysis of social welfare reform in Latin America, examining in particular the politics involved in implementing difficult and controversial social policies that often pit the middle strata of society, represented by powerful stakeholders, against the poor.

This collection of essays argues that old models of social protection are in crisis and, without completely rejecting past experiences, new paradigms might better address the problems of pervasive poverty and inequity that persist in and are often exacerbated by the new global economic environment.

The authors place contemporary social policy in historical perspective, study the connection between growth and welfare, and consider the efficacy of the state in the social sphere from both macro and micro perspectives. Underpinning the collection are issues relating to the question of the social contract between state and citizen and how the exercise of citizenship connects society and state.

This publication examines the social impact of an unprecedented crisis.