Professor Armando Barrientos has accustomed us to high-quality work that is both theoretically sound and empirically rigorous. Social Protection in Latin America: Causality, Stratification and Outcomes is no exception. In this open-access book, Barrientos provides a systematic examination of social protection institutions in the region. The book addresses a significant gap in the literature: the absence of a settled theory of social protection institutions in Latin America. It emphasises the importance of causal inference in studying these institutions. Barrientos distinguishes between two types of causal explanations: ‘effects of causes’ (e.g. the impact of conditional income transfers on labour supply) and ‘causes of effects’ (e.g. the factors behind the emergence of occupational insurance funds) (pp. 43–5).
Barrientos analyses the historical evolution of institutions (encompassing the essentials of a century of social protection), the stratification that social protection seeks to address but also reproduces, and the outcomes of welfare institutions (particularly their effects on poverty, inequality and labour markets).
Regarding the first point, the book identifies three critical periods in the development of social protection in the region: first, the industrialisation period (up to the 1980s), marked by the emergence of occupational insurance funds and the initial incorporation of (industrial) workers; second, the neoliberal reforms up to the 2000s, characterised by the introduction of individual retirement savings plans and retrenchment during the neoliberal period; third, the post-liberal period (also referred to by others as the post-neoliberal period), which saw the expansion of social assistance programmes and the second incorporation, this time of outsiders (2000s onward). Barrientos refers to these shifts as ‘critical realignments’ that reflect ‘discontinuities in patterns of political domination’ (p. 70). These periods are linked to broader changes such as industrialisation, globalisation and democratisation, which are also considered by the author. This analysis aligns well with his earlier proposal that Latin America has evolved from an informal welfare regime (prior to the first Bismarckian programmes) to a corporatist-informal regime (with the creation of the first social security programmes) and, later, to a liberal-informal regime following the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal wave. Moreover, the historical analysis could also be used to adapt Hugh Heclo’s historical framework of European welfare states’ ‘stages of welfarism’ to the Latin American experience.
Stratification has been one of Barrientos’ key areas of study, but the empirical evidence in this book helps us better understand the dual social protection systems present in the region. The evidence demonstrates how social protection institutions stratify wage earners by class, skill and sector, creating inequalities in access and benefits. The book deals with three stratification effects of social protection: employment, protection and incorporation. While the majority of workers in the informal sector, rural areas and low-income groups must settle for the crumbs of social assistance, some groups of workers in the formal sector (insiders) receive generous benefits from Bismarckian contributory programmes (e.g. social insurance pensions). Following Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Barrientos describes this as the ‘massification of privilege’ (p. 71). According to Barrientos, these institutions ‘help manage labour for productive activity, they protect selected workers and their families from income risks brought about by work interruptions, and they influence the political inclusion of groups of wage earners’ (p. 81).
The three stratification effects lead us to the rich empirical analysis of what Barrientos identifies as the ‘core social protection institutions in the region’ (p. 90): occupational pensions, individual retirement savings plans and social assistance.
For the first time, to my knowledge, we have historical cluster analyses of Latin American welfare systems. I greatly appreciate this effort to portray the country clusters using data from the 1970s, 1990s and 2010s. Barrientos confirms the main groups or clusters of countries identified in the current literature. These distinct groups, he argues, share similar patterns of employment stratification, income protection and political incorporation, and they are shaped by the historical and political trajectories of countries in the region. Neoliberalism disrupted these country groupings (almost creating a new one and making the groups more mixed in their membership), suggesting ‘that the three worlds of Latin American welfare are not set in stone and can be disrupted by shifts in the political-economy model’ (p. 263).
In conclusion, Professor Barrientos provides evidence and proposes causal mechanisms that will definitely help social policy scholars to finally construct a global theory of social protection, where European welfare states are merely special cases rather than the foundation for theories applied to other regions. Barrientos invites us to move ‘from correlation to causality’ in social protection research (p. 18) and to continue exploring the stratification effects, causal mechanisms and outcomes using the database he compiled for this magnificent book. Data and estimation models in R and Stata are freely available in the SPLA repository on GitHub (https://github.com/armando295/spla).
