WIDER Annual Lecture 23 - Informality: addressing the Achilles heel of social protection in Latin America

Social protection programmes have been in place in Latin America for over 75 years, but as a result of extensive informality, less than half the working population are covered by the contributory social insurance system.  How can social insurance systems be redesigned to provide coverage to all?

The 2019 WIDER Annual Lecture discusses the challenges of social protection in economies with large informal sectors, such as in Latin America. Making a critical distinction between social insurance and social assistance programmes — the former address risks which are common to all workers (illness, disability, death, longevity); the latter focus on redistribution, which in turn focuses on a subset of the population, typically those living in poverty.

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Biography 

The lecture will be delivered by Santiago Levy, main architect of Progresa/Oportunidades — Mexico's incentive-based health, nutrition and education program for the poor. Santiago Levy is currently a Non-resident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution and, until recently, was the Vice-President for Sectors and Knowledge at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). His previous positions in the Mexican government include General Director at the Mexican Social Security Institute, Deputy Minister at the Ministry of Finance, and president of the Federal Competition Commission. Before that he was Associate Professor of Economics at Boston University. Dr Levy is the author of at least 75 articles, monographs and book chapters

See also the Graduate Institute's Centre for Finance and Development event page

Programme