In Uruguay, like in other countries in Latin America, the management of the public social security programs has been frequently criticized. These programs have shown financial problems and high evasion and have been slow to adjust to the demographic changes. I argue in this paper that the poor management, the evasion and the inability to adapt to changing conditions were determined to a large extent by the old rules of the game. The public social security programs were administered with large degrees of discretion, both in terms of granting benefits and monitoring the contributions. I hypothesize that the whole society supported the discretionary social policy, because of the flexibility associated to this policy regime. The discretionary social policy was accepted as a substitute for the formal Welfare State that could not be organized. I also argue that the social security reform initiated in 1995 involved an institutional change that reduces the room for discretion in the system and put a halt to clientelism.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Carmen Estrades) or (Héctor Pastori).
Related research
Keywords:
Other versions of this item:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)