 Good morning. Thank you very much for this opportunity to share this presentation with you. Thank you to Miguel for organizing this this session. My presentation will be on social protection focused on Latin American countries and it's an ongoing work with my colleague Cecilia Rossell and mainly I want to go through four main points. First of all the discussion about the different social protection systems at different stages of development that are in place in Latin America at current. We have very different situations among countries and I want to emphasize on that. And then I want to quickly review what happened in the region during the last two decades. I think it was much more than only cash transfers so I will try to give a broad view about the main changes in the social protection systems and also to put them in context, in the context of the situation in the economic and the political setting that these changes took place. This is a situation that of course have changed recently so we are facing different economic conditions, different political conditions and that has to be taken into account when thinking about the future for social protection in the region. So I will end with some general ideas about the main challenges for social for the region. As I said one departing point that I think it's important when discussing social protection in Latin America is the different social protection systems that are at present in the region. We have very the Latin American countries have very different trajectories and reach different stages in the development of their welfare systems. This and even development of social protection systems is associated to a certain chronology of innovations in social protection and mainly to the moment of adoption of social insurance. And another important characteristic that political discretion and political bargaining shape both the creation and the expansion of social protection systems and there is plenty of literature from political science discussing that point. So there are many classifications of Latin American countries in terms of the of the state of advancement of the social protection in the region. If we combine six for example six different classifications that focus on different aspects in only one ranking that is what is shown in that figure we can distinguish three groups of countries. The darker part of the figure are the countries with more developed social protection systems and as it gets clearer they are the weakest systems and in the first group we have Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Uruguay and Brazil. There are countries where social protection systems are more developed and consolidated and it gets very clear when you combine all those rankings and in the opposite side in the opposite extreme you have Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Paraguay, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua with very heavily developed social protection systems and very low coverage in general terms and the intermediate situation we can look at Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. So what are the main characteristics of social protection systems in these three different groups of countries? In the first group in the group of countries with developed social protection systems we have high coverage of social security among workers and among the elderly, a high coverage of basic education and health services but with the stratification in terms of density and the quality of the services and the benefits limited room for or we can consider that there is limited room for reform due to the tight up of a certain architect that responds to strong interests, limited informality and a lower proportion of workers in low productivity sectors and a higher proportion of older populations. So a demographic pressure that is already there for these countries. In the intermediate group we have social security systems with intermediate coverage, limited coverage of basic social services, dual extractor also that covers many people from the urban sectors and educated and with higher income, high informality and employment and high levels of employment in low productivity sectors and non-contributory programs that cover a large proportion of the poor. And we have the Lagards, many countries from Central America where the development of social security is really very, very, very weak. The social services are also very weak, very limited coverage of the contributory system, non-contributory programs that have expanded but are very weak in terms of their institutional development and a very small tax burden. So a problem in how to finance social protection, high informality and high proportion of use in the population. So it's a completely different situation there. So how can we analyze what happened in the last two decades? A very basic index that we can consider just to show changes in coverage is the combination of changes in health coverage for wage awareness and for non-wage awareness of coverage of pension systems among wage awareness and non-wage awareness and then older population who receive pensions and total city coverage. So what we did is basically based on household surveys, a very simple index that is the combination, the arithmetic mean of these six indicators which are normalized just to show what happened in the countries. And what we have in the three groups of countries is the blue bar corresponds to 2002 and the orange to 2016. We have an expansion in social protection coverage in all the countries in the region. Also in the ones that belong to the first group developed countries in terms of the social protection system but also in the laggards in all countries there was an expansion in coverage of social protection and the expansion was higher in absolute terms in the intermediate groups. So many Colombia, Mexico, Dominican Republic were the countries that changed the most in this period in terms of coverage of social protection. If we decompose these changes, try to see which component or which of these three components, pensions, health, and conditional cash transfer were the ones that more contributed. We have a variety in the situation but in all cases in the intermediate countries for example health played an important role so it was not only the expansion of conditional cash transfers but mainly health. In the countries with developed social protection systems pensions played an important role for example in Argentina, Nureway, and in Brazil they were able to expand the contributory system and in the laggards we have in relative terms a higher impact of the conditional cash transfers. What happened in terms of social spending? That graph shows the public social spending as a percentage of GDP from 2000 to 2015 and it went from 11 percent of GDP to almost for more than 14 percent of GDP and the expansion if you look at the table there that shows the contribution of which component of social protection, the expansion corresponds to social protection and there we have social assistance is included there but I will show later that it's a minor part of social protection and we have also the role of education and health so different things were going on and the different components of evolving in terms of coverage and in terms of spending. I will go quickly through some data some basic data just to show for example what happened in health there were increases in coverage also in spending as I said we see the increases in Colombia in Mexico but also in Argentina also in Peru both for salaries and to allow us tend to not also for non-salary workers in the case for example of Mexico Colombia again but also Argentina Peru so we have a general trend to higher coverage. There were important transformations in terms of the extension of basic rights to informal sectors as it was previously discussed in the previous presentation increase access and benefits for former workers and new benefits that were accepted there are some examples for example in the case of Chile they introduced explicit guarantees for predefined health disorders in Uruguay there is there was an increasing access for the families for the children of formal workers and reduced barriers to access in Mexico and Colombia they went from coverage contingent on formal employment to parallel non-contributive health systems in Argentina there was a strengthening in health care to pregnancy and newborns through a protocolized insurance but the main challenges remain I have to do with effective access because of the cost and the payment the high cost and the payments that people have to make to to use the services the high levels of certification and the quality of services. What do we know about potential inefficiencies from non-contributory health insurance and in the previous presentation discussed this issue I'm basing here I'm using here a paper from Bosch and Manacorda that reviews the the evidence on this topic and they argue that the evidence such as the non-contributive insurance schemes tend to boost informal employment at the expense of formal employment in the cases of Colombia and Mexico which are the ones that they they get that the the impact evaluations the evidence in the case of Mexico is disputed because there are two papers with different results the papers are very different in terms of the methodology the data so it's hard to get a comparison in the case of Uruguay it's the opposite the extension of health care coverage to dependent children of registered private sector workers increase registered employment and there is a paper for Marcelo Vargo-Languijer-Macruse showing that for for the health reform in Uruguay. What happened with pensions we have also an increase in protection among workers and for salar workers and also for non-salar workers because in some countries there are special schemes that allow non-salar workers to contribute in for example in Brazil and in Uruguay there was an expansion for the for non-salar workers because of the inception of monotributos that allowed them to to make contributions to social security but there were other important things going on in terms of contributory pensions we have if we consider since 2008 up to now and here I'm taking I'm based on a on a paper from Alberto Arena de Mesa we have three structural reforms and 14 parametric reforms and the three structural reforms went were in Argentina Chile and Bolivia and they went from fully funded systems to different systems pay as you go system in Argentina an integrated system in Chile and the national legislation in the case of Bolivia the parametric reforms were of all types with there were in some cases a more flexibility in the access to to pensions changes in the in the replacement rates in the ages of retirement so a lot of movement in terms of the design of pensions so we can like characterize we have the famous that famous view of Latin America during the 80s and also the 90s where some important systems changed from fully towards fully founded models Chile Peru Argentina and Uruguay with a mixed system but from 2008 on we have a new trend towards public and solidarity based systems in Argentina in Bolivia and El Salvador and Chile with an ongoing discussion about their sustainability but it's a change in the in the way the region was decided what to do with their pensions another dimension that is present in in recent reform and was not there before is the gender dimension it was basically absent from certain reforms of pensions between 1981 and 2006 the implicit assumption was gender neutrality but between 2008 and 2000 and now some reforms attempt to address gender inequality through some specific measures like a special benefit for women who hope to for a retirement equal pensions rights for female domestic workers childcare credits recognition of banners for pension rights elimination of sex inferiority mortality rates a tables for calculation of the benefits so different measures in different countries a lot in Uruguay and Chile with this gender dimension as a result of all these changes the gaps in the gender gaps in coverage have decreased a lot but here I'm basing on a paper for Argentina Brazil Chile and Uruguay in in all cases the gender gap decreased in terms of coverage but the most relevant decreases are in Argentina thanks to the moratoria it's a result of that policy and also in Chile for the inception of the non-contributory pension and what we also found in that in that paper is that the gender pension gap among women and the among the elderly a decrease in all countries in that graph what we have is the difference between male and female pensions as a presentation of male of male pensions and it's calculated two ways in the darker one is considering only pensioners and the other one also the the zeroes I mean the older people who do who do not receive pensions are included and we see a decrease in the difference in in pensions between men and women in all countries and that decrease is a stronger in Argentina Brazil and the the idea that this was not the result of something that they it was wanted in terms of gender equality but basically it was a result of measure of the increase in the real value of pensions at the lower part of the distribution where women are overrepresented so as a result we get gender equality but the original objective of the policy was just to reach the more disadvantage in terms of the amount of pensions for non-contributory pensions there were changes also before the first thing is that some countries have a this system from a long time before much before 1980 but after 1997 many countries introduced or changed the the social pension schemes trying to provide near universal coverage through these non-contributory pensions and we have a lot of change a lot of non-contributory pensions in the region most of them after the 2000 and they are very different in terms of the eligibility and the generosity the result of this is that in terms of coverage in the 2000s we have 22% of people older than 60 covered but non-contributory pensions and in 2015 it's almost 40% and in terms of spending it went from 0.4 to 1% of GDP and what in terms of efficiency the discussion is where again I'm based on Bosch and Manacorda negative labor supply effects among the elderly attributable to non-negligible income elasticity of leisure for these people and also there is a recent paper from Galliani and others that they find improvements in well-being of poor people poor older people without any impact in terms of the of earnings on savings for future program participants so this is a recent evaluation about conditional cost transfer the two previous presentations have already discussed this in Latin America we went from 5% of coverage in terms of population to more than 20% of coverage in terms of population and in terms of budget spending it's a from less than 0.1 to 0.4 of GDP so it's a minor part of in terms of GDP and there are many debated issues with these programs now some have to do with conditionalities others have to do with the exit from the programs and others have to do as the previous presentation discussed with inefficiencies so what does the evidence say about the the results or the potential inefficiencies associated to these programs the effects of CCTs on participation and hours of work are generally small in magnitude and statistically significant but there may there are potentially losses you know inefficiency losses due to the interaction with contributed sex systems as discussed the loss of benefits at some level of formal elements may act as an implicit tax so at this instant for formal employment and there is some evidence suggesting that they tend to affect formal employment so this must lead us to think about the importance of the design of the power of the programs to mitigate these unintended adverse effects so for example eligibility based on strict verification of formal earnings may lead to substitute substitution away from from formal employment and we need to think about the ways to smooth the situations and in general here this is an updated version of our table from Bosch and Manacorda we have evidence about negative impacts on formality for Argentina, Ecuador and Uruguay in the cases of Uruguay for example they are based on administrative data so we we we can there all of them are rules of evaluation but they are very strong evaluations and in all cases we have never in Uruguay both in the previous CCT and in the in the actual one we have many papers that show the significant negative effects of employment these effects are mainly concentrated on women at the eligibility cut off because these these evaluations were done with regression discontinuity design so we are looking what happens there but also for Argentina they work by Gasparini old board for plan Hefezi Hefezi and also for the universal child allowance also shows a negative impact in Mexico this work from Aswara Marinescu does not show any impact on informal employment so what is important I think or it's that for example in the cases of Argentina and Uruguay there are specific aspects of the design of the programs that had to do for example of targeting informal population or that checking the trash the income threshold every month so if you surpass a certain limit you lose all the benefit with no smoothing that that may may help us to understand what's happening here I have to go very quickly maybe this is well known for you but the changes in social protection systems in Latin America took place in a context of economic growth improving in the fiscal situation this improvement in some cases was due to policy decision because there were also tax reforms in the in the region but also to the demand for primary booms on the commodity boom and this is no longer the situation but what is long what is the situation what does hold is the persistent structural constraints I mean there were no important changes in the levels of productivity of the region that are very low in in relative terms and there is also the pressure the pressure from demography as I said this is differential by countries but for more for the countries that have more developed social systems this is a very important issue and the political context where all those changes that I try to present a took place was was basically of new of new left governments and this is also changing in the region so when we think about the future ahead for social protection we this is something that must be taken into account and also some changes in or some suggestions of changes in the support for the for redistribution about the end of the pink time at the change in the in the orientation in the political orientation of the government we have there the blue part is right governments and the gray is left and what we have in from 2000 on was an important expansion of left governments but this context seems to be changing in the last year what are the implications for social welfare where for example there is a recent paper from political science that analyzes Chile and Argentina and in those cases for example there were not spending cuts there were no big changes in what was was being done in terms of of social protection Brazil is a different case probably so we are just like beginning a new era and we have to see what will happen there there is some evidence as I said of a decrease in support from redistribution this is the percentage of population who agrees with the statement that the state should implement strong policies to reduce income inequality between the rich and the poor and in all countries except in in Honduras this has decreased between 2008 and 2014 so there seems to be less support for redistribution the distributive policies this is the same idea I will skip it so which are the main challenges for the social protection I think in a very schematic way we can see of two models one is towards universalization trying to combine contributory and non-contributory schemes with a traditional financing and the other is a completely different architecture that was presented by Santiago Levy in the previous presentation and in both cases we have we may have some questions about the possibilities of doing this of taking this this path in the case of universal social protection the basic idea is that the region must insist in trying to incorporate a worker to the former sector and in the meanwhile we can think about non-contributory pillars as a way of getting to the to the final universal horizon but probably what is happening in many in many countries is that we are like building a two-child system of basic public public services and transfers for the poor and better services for the for the insiders it may even discourage formality as it was previously discussed so we may have important issues in terms of the design of the policies that should be revised and it's it clearly seems not possible for some of the countries as I presented in the first slides the countries with which I have very weak social protection systems like Central America they are very very far from this we can also think about the provision in universal basic social rights and this may be done as as Santiago presented by the elimination of labor contributions and finance and with the financing of consumption taxes so the idea is that trying to delink social insurance from labor status but they are we should discuss what are the basic levels will this lead to more segmentation as a higher people with higher incomes go to basically to the market what how regressive is this way of financial and which is the political economy of this of this the political coming that we need to do something like that and probably we must we should think about different strategies for different countries in the region for example in the case of the countries that have them more more developed social protection systems Argentina or why Brazil a complete modification in the architecture may not be adequate for them because they are with high levels of coverage so maybe there is a mix of situations in the region and we should think in that in those terms