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Understanding social protection systems in Latin America and the Caribbean: Typologies and efforts of classification
Author(s) -
Steffen Mariana Willmersdorf,
Côrtes Soraya Vargas
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
sociology compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.782
H-Index - 31
ISSN - 1751-9020
DOI - 10.1111/soc4.12634
Subject(s) - latin americans , social protection , sociology , strengths and weaknesses , welfare state , welfare , subject (documents) , social welfare , typology , regional science , political science , epistemology , computer science , law , anthropology , library science , politics , philosophy
The aim of this article is to present the current debate on Latin American social protection systems. Several studies have addressed this issue from different perspectives, discussing the existence or not of a welfare state in Latin America. In this paper, we focus on authors that have proposed a comparative approach to the analysis of these systems, building either typologies or indexes used to classify the existing social protection systems into groups, according to different criteria. By analyzing these criteria, we seek to understand the main trends and specificities of social protection systems in the region, suggesting which typologies would be the best to fit the subject of future researches. We argue that the studies better prepared to this proposal are those considering the peculiarities of the region, specifically the weight of informal welfare providers and its institutional weaknesses.