The rapid expansion of social protection in the South provides a rich diversity of experiences and lessons on how best to reduce poverty and ultimately eradicate it. Knowledge on how best to ‘grow’ social assistance, understood as long-term institutions responsible for reducing and...

The paper examines the structural and organisational problems of social insurance systems in Brazil and the Argentine in order to illuminate current debates about pension ‘reform’. Much of the present discussion depicts social insurance ‘crisis’ as a modern phenomenon. Similarly,...

Population ageing is now recognised as a global issue of increasing importance, and has many implications for health care and other areas of social policy. However, these issues remain relatively under-researched, particularly in poorer countries, and there is a dearth of specific policy...

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The paper accounts for the failure of public social spending in Latin American to reach poor and vulnerable groups of the population. It considers the level and allocation of expenditure; the distribution of entitlements across the population and the capacity of different groups to mobilize these...

This paper assesses the usefulness of Nussbaum's version of the capabilities approach for understanding the condition of older people in developing countries. It observes that ageing is a highly heterogeneous experience, but that policy debates take a polarized approach. The paper then...

In November 2002 the World Bank published a report on the Argentine health sector. The report accurately portrays the complexity and severity of the problems facing the health care system. It stresses that these problems are not purely a product of the country's economic collapse, noting that...