Latin American social protection systems show that the fundamental ambivalence of modernity is captured by the twin notion of liberty and discipline in the context of a plurality of modes of socio-political organization. According to this understanding, this article analyses the potential of the so-called Conditional Cash Transfer programmes, which are widespread in the region, to strength or reduce personal autonomy. These programmes are promoted by claiming their virtues to reduce poverty and impose good behaviour on poor people in order to improve the ‘human capital’ of future generations. However, numerous elements challenge these alleged virtues: arbitrary selection of beneficiaries, interference in people’s lives, stigmatization of recipients, inability to achieve universal coverage and act in a preventive manner with regards to urgent needs, the creation of poverty traps and informal working, etc. Taking these elements into account, this article explains how these programmes do not improve people’s autonomy and political independence.
According to the conventional approving account of the transformations which have been taking place in public policy and in markets in Latin America, Argentina constitutes one of the most successful examples of wide-ranging and rapid change. Certainly the experience of Argentina offers an excellent case-study of what in the literature is termed "the retrenchment of the welfare states"; that is those institutional transformations associated with the "neoconservative revolutions" of recent years. In this paper I analyse the characteristics of Argentinian welfare state retrenchment, distinguishing between two fields of analysis: (1) "systemic retrenchment" which is linked to changes in the "referential environment" of social policy institutions, especially changes in the economic, fiscal, labour market and politico-institutional contexts; (2) "programmatic retrenchment" which refers to changes in the institutional ordering of specific social policies. Finally I draw conclusions in respect of the strategies adopted for the retrenchment of the welfare state in Argentina and discuss probable prospects for the future.
Frente a la pandemia del COVID19, los gobiernos de América Latina han tomado medidas que tienen y tendrán un profundo impacto económico y social. Si bien muchas de estas medidas mitigan parte del costo inmedia- to de la pandemia y de las estrategias epidemiológicas para su contención, las mismas pueden terminar potenciando las vulnerabilidades de la estructura social y los déficits de los sistemas de protección social. En este escenario se observa el crecimiento del debate de propuestas como el ingreso ciudadano o renta básica. Pese a que sería deseable su implementación, no hay muchas posibilidades en el corto plazo porque la misma depende de cambios en la percepción de las elites, de la inversión para superar los déficits estructurales en la provisión de bienes públicos y de la transformación de las concepciones que sostiene a las actuales políticas de transferencias monetarias focalizadas y condicionadas.
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