Recent multi-pillar pension reforms tighten the link between payroll contributions and benefits, leading critics to argue that they will hurt women, who have less continuous employment and earn lower wages than men. However, these reforms also remove distortions and target redistributions to low earners, which help women. This paper tests these conflicting claims in the case of three Latin American countries-Chile, Argentina and Mexico. We find that women’s own-annuities are lower than those of men in multi-pillar pension schemes, but women are recipients of net public transfers and private intra-household transfers through joint pensions. As a result, women have gained more than men from the reforms.

This paper discusses the main restrictions, problems and dilemmas that social provision faces in Latin America in a context of demographic changes and low achievements in the economic performance, particularly in the labor market. It is proposed the need to adapt the general social provision matrix as function of priorities and restrictions set by financing access. Due to the limited labor performance, labor income represents an insufficient source of financing and, in some cases, is inadequate to finance the basic social provision, which should be based of noncontributing criteria. Nevertheless, labor market together with pensions, will continue constituting one of the main pillars of income sources and socioeconomic security for the older adults in Latin America. Thus, a higher labor participation of this age group is expected, which leads to reflections on the soundness of labor.

The article documents the failure of social security in Mexico as an instrument of social protection and evaluates possible reform strategies. It analyses the truncated coverage of these systems for the most vulnerable, the regressive incidence and horizontal inequities of public social security subsidies, and the consequences for old-age poverty and inequalities in basic health opportunities. It considers reforms to transit from the current polarized system to a system of basic universal protection, and it presents estimates of the costs and incidence of net benefits from a universal pension and health insurance. It proposes a transition from a model centered in a mandatory contributive component (pillar 2) of ample benefits and limited coverage, to one centered on a basic, non contributive, universal component (pillar 1), complemented by a voluntary contributive component (pillar 3).

This paper analyses the influence of new rights derived from the Social Security System in Brazil after the Federal Constitution (1988). At least, three different and independent forces determinate the arrangements in social security policies: 1) the new social rights created by constitutional rules in response to social pressure; 2) the decrease of employment and wages in salaried jobs imposed by business cycle; 3) the trend on demographic transition and its direct, but modest influence in the system. In spite of ideological differences, there is a consensus that social security financing depends on an increase of at least 4% per year in GDP.

This paper analyses the factors affecting the decision to apply a reform (parametric and structural) in the Americas, which may hold a specific set of conditions, i.e. a sui generis political system and a high degree of economic openness, among others. Economic freedom is relevant in the case of structural reforms, while results for the share of older population are not conclusive. It may be that governments seek efficiency, while older members of society still do not have the channels to effectively influence policies and also those benefited by the social security are the few.