The paper examines the structural and organisational problems of social insurancesystems 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 modernphenomenon. Similarly,...

This paper examines the decline of National Insurance in Britain, as witnessedby its declining share of all social security spending and the steady dilution ofthe “contributory principle” on which it was originally based. It argues that thisdecline is not an accident: under governments of...