Social security and pension system : the deep stratification of latin american societies

Abstract

Pension programmes have occupied a central space in the long history of social policy in Latin America. Social policy took the shape of Bismarckian social insurance systems, which had at their core different types of pensions, like old age, survivors’, disability and work-risks pensions. The evolution of social insurance followed an incremental path with various degrees of fragmentation and stratification reflecting and reproducing labour market structures. Due to the persistent segmentation of labour markets that was never diluted, large sectors of the population remained excluded. Social security and pension systems have transformed the Latin American welfare systems into a comprehensive but dual and stratified one. This chapter delves into the Latin American pension systems focusing on the policy architectures, the typologies of the contributory and non-contributory pensions, and the trajectories of change and reform in the last 30 years. The chapter concludes discussing some of the challenges for the twenty-first-century.