Global Social Policy

Abstract

Social policy and social protection systems were conceived as tools to address social risks and manage systemic asymmetries in capitalist societies. These institutions have undergone uneven development in different regions and countries around the world. The differences derived from their designs, the capacity of the states that carried them forward, and the context in which they operated, including economic structures, labor markets, and social structures.While in Europe there is a welfare state that, with variations, provides income protection to those experiencing unemployment, illness, old age, and so forth, in the United States these protections are provided primarily by the market (and the option to purchase private insurance) complemented with weak welfare policies. In most of the global South the welfare regime is incomplete, insufficient, segmented, and disjointed.Even where social protection is more extensive and robust, it fails to address inequalities, including gender inequalities (Ungerson and Kember 1997; Pascall 1996; Orloff 1993; Sabates-Wheeler and Kabeer 2003; Holmes and Jones 2013). In social insurance systems built on contributory schemes that covered wage-earners (thus mostly men), gender inequalities characteristic of the world of paid work were transferred to social protection. For example, given women’s predominance in low-waged jobs without benefits and precarious forms of employment, women had less access to social welfare protection and lower benefits when they accessed them. In addition, women’s unpaid work burden limits their labor market opportunities and therefore their ability to contribute to social insurance. In turn, that unpaid work is not recognized as a job and deprives women from receiving other types of social benefits, such as health coverage, or even the right to pension. Further, women’s disproportionate unpaid work burden reproduces gender inequalities in the labor market and has been identified as a main contributor to income poverty among women (Antonopoulos 2008; Gammage 2010; Bardasi and Wodon 2010; Sepúlveda 2013).Contemporary capitalism increases social risks for several reasons (Sen and Durano 2015). First, it increases inequality. Piketty (2014) provides perhaps the most extensive evidence and analysis of the dynamics of increasing income inequality in 20th-century capitalism. Other studies highlight additional dimensions of inequality, in terms of both the diverse meaning and lived experiences of inequality in the global North and the global South and the intersection of class inequalities with gender, race, and ethnic inequalities (Moeller 2016; Perrons 2014; Seguino 2015).Second, contemporary capitalism increases economic instability and vulnerability while limiting the state’s ability to implement public policy. The deregulation of the movement of financial flows increases the vulnerability of countries (mainly those with more open economies and greater external dependence) to external shocks. Likewise, fiscal austerity, which is promoted as the main recipe to confront financial and economic crises, leads to the contraction of public policy space of the states (Antonopoulos 2014; Ghosh 2009).Third, contemporary capitalism promotes a race to the bottom in terms of labor, fiscal, and environmental standards. Countries compete with each other to attract foreign investment and do so by offering more tax incentives, more flexible labor-protection frameworks (with the goal of achieving lower labor costs), and weak environmental standards with very low enforcement (Sen and Durano 2015). Flexible labor arrangements deteriorate the conditions of paid work, in particular salaried work, that could address social risks (ILO 2019).All of these trends contribute to the process of increasing migratory flows, both for economic reasons and for displacements linked to political conflicts and environmental issues. They also contribute to the feminization of poverty in some countries and regions, in terms of higher incidence of income poverty among women compared to men and the particular way that women suffer and face poverty. The last few decades have also witnessed the feminization of anti-poverty public policies in the form of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs (Aguilar 2011; Chant 2015; Onu Mujeres 2017).This context confronts us with new challenges and dilemmas regarding social protection: what are, from a feminist point of view, the benefits and limitations of current forms of anti-poverty policies that are intended to serve people excluded from the central bodies of social protection? How have CCT schemes fared in alleviating poverty and reducing gender inequality? Can the universal basic-income proposal be compatible with a feminist agenda? Does it properly address issues regarding sexual division of labor, women’s participation in the labor market, and recognition and redistribution of unpaid care work? Are social protection floor schemes suitable for current conditions, and do they have the potential to reduce gender and socioeconomic inequality? Are current reforms on social protection aligned with the basic principles of social protection floors?