Are welfare regimes a useful category? The cross-sectoral variation in social policy in Latin America at the end of the commodity boom

Abstract

The literature on welfare and social policy regimes often assumes that countries perform consistently across policy sectors. Is this assumption correct, particularly in the global South? Do countries that do well in a given policy sector do also well in others? This article examines the matter by contrasting pensions with health care in Latin America, clustering countries based on their degree of segmentation in policy outputs. As a region, Latin America is an interesting case to study because of its comparatively high levels of social spending, long history of welfare systems, significant policy transformation in the first decade of the twenty-first century and extensive body of research. Findings show that while some countries do consistently well or poorly across sectors, others report an uneven performance. Questioning overarching generalizations based on the notion of the regime, the paper calls for further comparative analysis on the political economy behind the sectoral change.

Welfare regimes in twenty-first-century Latin America

“…In their view, a key problem with the necessary generalization when taking this approach is that different sectors of social policy might not necessarily reflect similar models of welfare. In their comparison across countries in the pension and health sectors, they found that although most of the countries in their sample showed a consistent welfare regime across sectors, in their own words, “confirming the usefulness of the welfare regime approach,” a number of countries had disparate performances across sectors (Martínez Franzoni and Sánchez-Ancochea, 2021).…”

The role of an emergency basic income: Lessons from the Latin American experience to confront the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…These adverse effects are strongly connected to the structural deficit in social protection systems prevalent in the region. Despite variations among countries and improvements over the past two decades, the region's welfare regimes are characterized by what has been defined as a segmented and dual model that separates those with access to social protection through formal employment from the rest of the population, who rely on non-contributory instruments (Arza et al, 2022;Martínez Franzoni and Sánchez-Ancochea, 2021). For instance, access to health systems was conditioned by the historical weaknesses of the sector, with chronic underfunding, very low public spending, and a high proportion of private and out-of-pocket spending.…”

The clandestine welfare: The role of illicit actors in the provision of social protection in Latin America

“…There are many other interesting attempts to classify, explain, and compare welfare in various regions of the Global South (see, for example, Pribble, 2011;Cruz-Martinez, 2014;Kim, 2015;Mkandawire, 2020;Martínez-Franzoni and Sánchez-Ancochea, 2021); however, as suggested by Mahon (2018), most of these conceptualisations acknowledge that social protection is mostly provided in the form of a diamond model in which state, market, family, and communities participate all together although at different levels of intensity. Furthermore, Roumpakis (2020) stresses how emerging literature is expanding even further the diamond by considering the importance of many forms of informal and non-statutory welfare protection provided by actors such as transnational families, international organisations, and voluntary and non-governmental organisations.…”