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Emerging Socio-Demographic Transitions: New Challenges for Latin American Social Protection
Abstract Submissions Closed
RC19 Sociology of Poverty, Social Welfare and Social Policy (host committee)
Language: English and Spanish
Session Type: Oral
Recent years, Latin America has witnessed the acceleration of socio-demographic transitions, especially regarding international migration flows, ageing, and increased female participation in the labour market. Migration flows steadily grew in the last ten years, especially from Venezuela and the Caribbean to both traditional destinations (US and Spain) and other Latin American countries. Likewise, political instability and negative consequences of natural disasters triggered new patterns on Haitian migration flows to South American countries, especially in Brazil (67,226 for the period 2010-2016) and Chile (17,849 for the period 2011-2015) (OIM and IPPDH, 2017).
Regarding ageing, the old-age dependency ratio grew from 7.7 % to 11.3% between 1980 and 2015 (ECLAC, 2017) and the pace of ageing is much faster than the process experienced by European countries (Altamirano and others, 2018). Finally, female participation in the labour market overpassed 50 per cent by 2015 in most countries (ECLAC, 2017), but with higher rates of precarious and informal jobs than males (ILO, 2015).
The scope and speed of socio-demographic transitions involve central challenges to advance towards inclusive social protection. For instance, these transitions demand adaptations of social security systems to extend coverage of old-age pensions, include immigrants and people holding informal and precarious jobs. Immigration and ageing require the development of health care policies able to extend coverage and generosity of health services and decrease health-related financial risks. Notably, these challenges involve the reduction of inclusion and exclusion errors, embracing the guidelines promoted by the global partnership for “Universal Social Protection by 2030”.
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