210 16. Latin America: inertia and transformation in five dual welfare regimes Carlos Barba Solano and Enrique Valencia Lomelí INTRODUCTION: COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF SOCIAL WELFARE: CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LATIN AMERICAN WELFARE REGIME As the stage of import-substituting industrialization (ISI) 1 came to a close and especially from the 1990s onwards, a new period of economic liberalization began in Latin America (LA) accompanied by a set of ‘market friendly’ reforms of social security systems. In this context a new generation of comparative studies, critical of neoliberal orthodoxy, developed a number of typologies to facilitate understandings of the dilemma created by advances in democracy and the liberalization of the economy and the more precarious forms of employment, and new forms of poverty and inequality, that emerged as a result. Table 16.1 shows the chronological order in which the typologies were developed, their central concepts and the number of regime-types that each contained. There is not enough room to analyse these typologies in detail, but we can point out their shared characteristics and the particularities of the five cases considered in this chapter, which cover the whole set of welfare regimes in this region. First, we refer to Mesa-Lago (1986, 2007) whose typology takes into account three successive waves of social security and health systems established in LA. 2 We are especially interested in the first two waves, the first refer- ring to the ‘pioneer’ countries – those that created social security systems between 1920 and 1930 – and the second relating to the ‘intermediate’ countries that developed these systems between 1940 and 1950. Among the first group is one of our case studies, Brazil, while the other four cases, Panama, Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela, can be located in the second group. Both categories refer to the moment when the systems were created and also to the degree of maturity they had attained when Mesa-Lago’s typology was developed. The second typology of non-democratic social states (SS) – those established in the 1930s during the ISI period – was developed by Filgueira (2005), in order to compare the trajectory of several Latin American countries in three areas: the degree of maturity of the ISI model; advances in the field of democracy; and state efforts in the field of social policy. We are interested in highlighting one of the types proposed by Filgueira, namely that of ‘dual social states’, which he applied to Brazil and Mexico. Both countries have highly heterogeneous production, corporatist and vertical forms of political incorporation, and modern forms of social protection, combined with clientelist and patrimonial mechanisms in less developed areas, dual cover in social security and health systems, and levels of poverty higher than those prevailing in stratified universalist social states such as Argentina and Chile (Filgueira, 2005). The typology developed by Barba applies the concept of a ‘welfare regime’ (WR) (Esping-Andersen, 1990) to the context of Latin America for the first time (Barba, 2003, 2007, 2019). Barba proposes a typology for three types of WR during the ISI period: the uni- Carlos Barba Solano and Enrique Valencia Lomelí - 9781788113526 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 08/25/2020 10:54:34AM by emma.penton@e-elgar.co.uk via AUTHOR COPY - NOT TO BE POSTED IN AN OPEN ONLINE REPOSITORY