Created in 2003 by the unification of four earlier initiatives, Bolsa Família currently provides cash transfers to 13 million people and supports more than one-third of the children that go to primary school in Brazil. This article extends and expands previous reviews on the origins, development and impact of the programme. The authors consider the political and economic dimensions in their evaluation of Bolsa Família's contribution to the reduction of poverty and inequality. They argue that Bolsa Família's ultimate impact will partly depend on a reduction of inequalities in public provision of health and education, which in turn may require a more active political role for the poor.

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Has the past decade of sustained economic growth and political transformations reversed Latin America's historical failure to secure market and social incorporation? To address this question this article draws on the experiences of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay by distinguishing between short‐term outcomes – which may depend on benign international conditions – and policy changes, which are more important for long‐term performance. It highlights the overall success of both Brazil and Uruguay and shows that the other countries have made more progress in terms of social than market incorporation.

For all the agreement regarding the segmented character of Latin America's social policy, few studies define it clearly, let alone suggest exact ways to measure it. This article provides a more precise definition based on a threefold policy output comprising coverage, generosity, and equity. Empirically, the article explores the cross‐national variation in segmentation in health care within Latin America in 2000 and 2013, before and after Latin America's economic boom. The article clusters countries, evaluates which ones improved their relative position during the 2000s, and determines the overall level of segmentation in the region. Findings are twofold. First, we identify three clusters: countries that respectively do particularly well and poorly across policy dimensions in 2000 and 2013, and a smaller set of countries that improved significantly, particularly regarding coverage and generosity. Second, despite cross‐national differences, there are shared regional challenges—the risk of catastrophic expenditure being a case in point. Our analysis demonstrates the need to move beyond coverage as a policy goal and pay more attention to gaps in generosity in every country. We also call for better indicators to measure performance beyond coverage across countries, and more studies that explain the similarities and differences between countries that improved considerably during the 2000s.

This article explores a missing link in the recent literature on the formation of social policies: that between democracy and universalism, one desirable yet elusive feature of these policies. We base our argument on a case study of Costa Rica, the most successful case of universalism in Latin America. We proceed by first depicting Costa Rica's peculiar policy architecture, based on the incremental expansion of benefits funded on payroll taxes. Then we reconstruct the policy process to stress the key role played by technopoliticians in a democratic context. Backed by political leadership and equipped with international ideas, technopoliticians drove social policy design from agenda setting to adoption and implementation. Third, we argue that key aspects of the policy architecture established in the early 1940s were fundamental building blocks for a distinctive and seldom explored road to universalism. We conclude considering contemporary implications.

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Past experience and both orthodox and heterodox economic theories lead us to expect a positive relationship between income inequality and commodity booms. Yet Latin America's recent improvement in income distribution coincided with a rapid growth in commodity exports. How was this positive outcome possible? Did income distribution improve because of higher commodity revenues or despite them? This paper answers these questions-seldom explored in the recent literature-using a combination of sources. The paper shows that the reduction of inequality took place among the bottom 90 percent of the population only, while the income share of the wealthy remained stable when properly measured. The reduction in the Gini coefficients had a lot to do with (re) distributive policies that enlarged the impact of labour market outcomes. The paper concludes that political pressures forced most Latin American governments to manage the commodity boom better than in the past in the short run but did not lead to significant transformations in the region's elitedriven development model.