Social Policies and Center-Right Governments in Argentina and Chile

2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (03) ◽  
pp. 72-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Niedzwiecki ◽  
Jennifer Pribble
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Cash Transfers ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
Left Turn ◽  
The Past ◽  
Poverty And Inequality ◽  
Left Party ◽  
Spending Cuts

AbstractLatin America's “left turn” expanded cash transfers and public services, contributing to lower poverty and inequality. Recently, right-leaning candidates and parties have begun to win back seats in the legislature, and in some cases have captured the executive branch. This shift has sparked debate about the future of Latin America's welfare states. This article analyzes social policy reforms enacted by two recent right-leaning governments: that of Sebastián Piñera in Chile (2010–14) and Mauricio Macri in Argentina (2015–). It finds that contrary to neoliberal adjustment policies of the past, neither Macri nor Piñera engaged in privatization or deep spending cuts. Instead, both administrations facilitated a process of policy drift in some sectors and marginal expansion in others. Policy legacies and the strength of the opposition help to explain these outcomes, suggesting that Latin America's political context has been transformed by the consolidation of democracy and the experience of left party rule.

Social Policies and Center-Right Governments in Argentina and Chile

2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 72-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Niedzwiecki ◽  
Jennifer Pribble
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Cash Transfers ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
Left Turn ◽  
The Past ◽  
Poverty And Inequality ◽  
Left Party ◽  
Spending Cuts

AbstractLatin America's “left turn” expanded cash transfers and public services, contributing to lower poverty and inequality. Recently, right-leaning candidates and parties have begun to win back seats in the legislature, and in some cases have captured the executive branch. This shift has sparked debate about the future of Latin America's welfare states. This article analyzes social policy reforms enacted by two recent right-leaning governments: that of Sebastián Piñera in Chile (2010–14) and Mauricio Macri in Argentina (2015–). It finds that contrary to neoliberal adjustment policies of the past, neither Macri nor Piñera engaged in privatization or deep spending cuts. Instead, both administrations facilitated a process of policy drift in some sectors and marginal expansion in others. Policy legacies and the strength of the opposition help to explain these outcomes, suggesting that Latin America's political context has been transformed by the consolidation of democracy and the experience of left party rule.

Central and Eastern European Countries

2021 ◽  
pp. 880-898
Author(s):  
Linda J. Cook ◽  
Tomasz Inglot
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Family Policy ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Eu Integration ◽  
Eastern European Countries ◽  
Domestic Influences

This chapter discusses welfare state developments in eleven countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) that have joined the European Union since 2004. It addresses historical, socioeconomic, and political contexts, with reference to theoretical questions involving typologies, clustering, and patterns of convergence in social policies. It analyses diversity in welfare provision that we can observe not only within the region, but also in Europe as a whole. It also explores different social policy programmes and benefits, contrasting international and domestic influences that have become relevant especially since the Great Recession of 2008. These influences include continuing pressures of EU integration and countervailing domestic trends of rising nationalism, populism, and Euro-scepticism within CEE states, especially in Hungary and Poland. The chapter discusses four main areas of CEE welfare from 2008 until 2020: family policy, health care, employment and labour markets, and social security (pensions) and social assistance. It illustrates region-wide and subregional trends and commonalities, as well as divergence across individual welfare states. At least in Poland and Hungary, conservative, family-orientated ideas that are often promoted as an ‘antidote’ to more liberal European norms seem to have driven policy reforms more than any other factor. Nationalist and populist leaders have expanded many welfare programmes, but their rhetoric could not hide the high levels of inequality in income, health, housing, and many other areas that persist and have not been adequately addressed by social policy in CEE states.

Perspectives for Transnational Social Policy

1992 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abram de Swaan
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The West ◽  
National State ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Welfare State

WELFARE STATES ARE NATIONAL STATES, AND IN EVERY country welfare is a national concern, circumscribed by the nation's borders and reserved for its residents alone. In the course of centuries, these states have emerged from and against one another, in mutual competition, and in the past century this process of state formation in the West went in tandem with the collectivization of care. The welfare state is the national state in its latest phase. It may be succeeded by another stage which we may eventually see.

Conceptualizing and Theorizing Social Policy, Poverty, and Inequality

2020 ◽  
pp. 22-37
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Comprehensive Approach ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
Extreme Poverty ◽  
Policy Paradigm ◽  
Poverty And Inequality

The chapter conceptualizes and theorizes social policy in the context of poverty and inequality. Inequality and poverty are two concepts that are by definition multi-dimensional and, therefore, require a comprehensive approach. The chapter argues that different theories underpinned social policies of welfare states in their fight against extreme poverty and inequality. The chapter, therefore, seeks to examine the following concepts and theories as they influence the development and reform of social policies: conceptual clarifications of social policy, poverty, social exclusion and inclusion, social cohesion or equity, theoretical underpinnings that influence social policy development and reforms, and the new social policy paradigm.

scholarly journals How does fiscal austerity impact on poverty and inequality? The Spanish case

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Campoy-Muñoz ◽  
M. A. Cardenete ◽  
F. J. De Miguel-Vélez ◽  
J. Pérez-Mayo
Keyword(s):  
General Equilibrium ◽  
Computable General Equilibrium ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Public Deficit ◽  
Poverty And Inequality ◽  
Fiscal Adjustments ◽  
Fiscal Austerity ◽  
Redistributive Effects ◽  
Spending Cuts

AbstractThe aim of this paper is contributing to fill the gap between the macroeconomic effects of policy reforms and the microeconomic and social ones, considering simultaneously both kind of impacts. Regarding fiscal adjustments, concern about the sustainability of public deficit and debt resulting from the Great Recession led governments to adopt austerity measures in most European countries. Our analysis considers the redistributive effects of such adjustments for the Spanish economy by simulating a hypothetical reduction of public deficit and distinguishing between spending cuts and tax hikes. In terms of analytical approach, a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model and a microsimulation model are integrated to include the general equilibrium effects of these measures as well as the effects on income distribution. The results contribute to the growing but limited literature on the distributional effects of fiscal consolidations by showing that policymakers have to choose between more inequality or more poverty.

Social Dictatorships

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferdinand Eibl
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Coalition Building ◽  
Social Spending ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Resource Endowment ◽  
External Threat ◽  
Spending Cuts ◽  
The Welfare State

Why have social spending levels and social policy trajectories diverged so drastically across labour-abundant MENA regimes? And how can we explain the persistence of social spending after divergence? This books sets out to answer both questions. Itdevelops a theory about the emergence of authoritarian welfare states, arguing that autocratic leaders need both the incentives and the abilities to distribute welfare for authoritarian welfare states to emerge. The former are shaped by coalition-building dynamics at the onset of regime formation while the latter are conditioned by the external environment. At the level of incentives, broad coalitions emerge in the presence of intra-elite conflict and the absence of salient communal cleavages and, if present jointly, provide a strong incentive for welfare provision. Conversely, a cohesive elite or salient communal divisions entail small coalitions with few incentives to distribute welfare broadly. At the level of abilities, a strong external threat to regime survival is expected to undermine the ability to provide social welfare in broad coalitions. Facing a ‘butter or guns’ trade-off, elites shiflpriority to security expenditures; only fiscal surpluses from an abundant resource endowment can provide the necessary resources to avert this trade-off. To explain the persistence of social policy trajectories, the author relies on two important mechanisms in the welfare state literature: ‘constituency politics’ where beneficiaries of social policies avert deviations from the spending path in the form of systemic reforms or large-scale spending cuts; and spill-over effects to unintended beneficiaries who can become important gatekeepers against path divergence.

scholarly journals The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on poverty and inequality in Mexico

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Luis Huesca ◽  
Linda Llamas ◽  
H. Xavier Jara ◽  
César O. Vargas Téllez ◽  
David Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Probit Model ◽  
Cash Transfers ◽  
Microsimulation Model ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Poverty And Inequality ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Automatic Stabilizers ◽  
Do So

The objective is to quantify the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on employment, poverty and inequality in Mexico. The methodology is based on a probit model to identify individuals at risk of employment loss, whose earnings are set to zero in ENIGH 2018 to match changes in employment and earnings observed in between December 2019 and the May 2020 according to ENOE and ETOE surveys, respectively. MEXMOD, Mexico’s microsimulation model, is used to simulate tax-benefit policies based on the pre-COVID and COVID-scenarios. The results show that there was a loss of 12.1 million jobs. Poverty reached 60.16% and extreme poverty reached 29.73%; inequality grew 8.2%. It is recommended to strengthen social policy with extra funding (taxing the rich) to achieve greater redistribution. The limitation is that income distribution is held constant as we do not have ENIGH 2020. The originality is to offer timely measures of poverty and inequality using microsimulation techniques to overcome the lack of data during the pandemic. The research concludes that there are not automatic stabilizers to cope COVID-19 negative effects and cash-transfers are not sufficient to do so.

Postindustrial Pressures, Political Regime Shifts, and Social Policy Reform in Japan and South Korea

2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ito Peng
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Population Aging ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
Social Policy Reform ◽  
Demographic Shifts ◽  
And Gender

This article examines how postindustrial pressures and political changes have shaped recent social policy reforms in Japan and South Korea. Postindustrial pressures are categorized intoexogenousandendogenousfactors: exogenous being economic globalization and internationalization, endogenous being changing family and gender relations and demographic shifts such as population aging and declining birthrates. I argue that we need to attend more closely to the interactions between postindustrial and political factors to explain social and welfare policies in these countries. The conventional view on East Asian welfare states no longer adequately explains recent social welfare policy changes in the region.

Beyond the austerity-driven hypothesis: Political economic theses on penality and the recent prison population decline

2021 ◽  
pp. 147737082110006
Author(s):  
José A. Brandariz
Keyword(s):  
Prison Population ◽  
Population Decline ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
The Past ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
Global North ◽  
Economic Perspectives ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Spending Cuts

In what might be called the ‘austerity-driven hypothesis’, a consistent strand of literature has sought to explain the prison downsizing witnessed in many jurisdictions of the global north over the past decade by referring to the financial crisis of the late 2000s to early 2010s and its effects in terms of public spending cuts. Since this economic phase is essentially over, whereas the (moderate) decarceration turn is still ongoing, there are good reasons to challenge this hypothesis. This article delves into the non-economic forces that are fostering a prison population decline that, 10 years on, is becoming the new ‘penal normal’. The article thereby aims to spark a dialogue not only with the scholarship exploring the prison downsizing but also with certain theoretical frameworks that have played a key role in examining the punitive turn era. Additionally, the article contributes to the conversation on the need to reframe materialist readings on penality in a ‘non-reductionist’ fashion. By revisiting heterodox theses and scrutinizing the impact of recent penal changes on traditional materialist accounts, the article joins the collective endeavour seeking to update political economic perspectives on punishment and the penal field.

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