Social Protection for Brazil of the Future : Preparing for Change with Inclusion and Resilience

This policy note assesses how Brazil's social protection and labor systems can be reformed most effectively to meet the challenges that the country will face in the next two decades while also fostering social inclusion and shared prosperity. This discussion is timely as Brazil is slowly recovering from the global COVID-19 crisis, which brought new challenges as well as accelerating existing socioeconomic transformations. Despite the fact that labor markets are slow to recover after economic crises in Brazil, implementing the right set of policies could enable the country to take advantage of changes in the world of work, new opportunities for human capital formation, and recent developments in technology and delivery systems to build back better than in the past. Serving as a companion piece on social protection and labor policies for the Flagship Report "Alternative Futures for Brazil: Inclusion, Productivity, Sustainability" (World Bank, Forthcoming), this note draws from a large body of recent analytical work by the World Bank team in Brazil. The vision of the flagship report is for Brazil to reach 2040, two decades from now, with a more productive and resilient and less unequal society