Round Tables > Economy

POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SOCIAL PROTECTION IN THE FACE OF THE HEALTH AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC SHOCK OF COVID-19 IN THE AMERICAS

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2:45pm-4:45pm

Centre de Colloques, room 2

Organization : Thibaud Deguilhem (LADYSS – Université de Paris) and Sarah Rozenblum (University of Michigan)

Speakers : Daniel Beland (McGill University), Mariely Lopez-Santana (George Mason University), Ricardo Velazquez Leyer (Universidad Iberoamericana of Mexico City)

Presentation : Although American countries were touched differently by the pandemic waves since March 2020, they were quickly considered as one of the epicenters in terms of contaminations and deaths. Despite the sociopolitical national compromises influencing the willingness of intervention and the level of skepticism on the governments’ part, the deep institutional deficiencies of American states are being found out day after day, revealing an unbearable dilemma between health costs and socio-economic costs. On the health side, several direct effects of the pandemic crisis are visible: the deficiency of administrative organization on the territories, the extremely quick saturation of public and private hospital capacity, already very limited before the pandemic. On the side of the socio-economic crisis, the effects of different interventions decreed during the first wave are multiple and cumulative: the explosion of unemployment and the economic downturn for informal workers, quickly followed by the increase in vulnerability and poverty and even famine in some areas. This double crisis, both direct and induced, reveals the deep weaknesses of American welfare systems and social compro- mises, which result from a long historical process. First, the liberalization of the health sector was emphasized under the effect of the 1990s structural adjustment programs, before the retraction of the social protection system was considered to achieve goals of good governance in public expenses. The system was then used to fight for poverty reduction strategies through pro-poor targeting at the beginning of the 2000s. Therefore, this progressive regional deconstruction rendered the healthcare system unable to face the crisis and reduced the capacity of countries to provide universal services, leaving social protection segmented and fragmented. On the one hand, if most of the population is actually covered by a minimal network of assistance through a contributive system – a relic of developmentalist models –, the coverage against social risks is limited to health, and patient care in public services is low-quality. On the other hand, for a minority, insurance companies and the private sector are more efficient in dealing with the multiplicity of risks, and wealthy households obtain coverage equivalent to that of the private sector in Europe. Because of this segmentation, inequalities of access to social security are strong and encourage various biases, especially territorial. Another consequence of this fragmentation is that costs are often prohibitive for households, many of whom in the lower «middle» class forgo protection, thereby risking vulnerability and exposure to shocks out of necessity. Thus, capitalist systems in the Americas converge in towards a limited and contracted social state, leaving and/or plunging a big part of the population in vulnerability zones: without protection and often without private savings, they only depend on labor incomes from low-quality jobs, which expose them to illness, workplace accident risk and turnover for which they are not covered (continuum between informal and formal jobs without protection). Obviously, this phenomenon affects more specifically the most vulnerable groups on the labor market: women or ethnic groups who have a limited access to the different types of care needed in case of shock. Yet, as a mediation group between economic, political and domestic orders, social protection is one of the key mechanisms of social cohesion which (re)-embed forms of family and communitarian solidarity and commercial devices allowing to constitute society as such, which is essential in a world of isolation and disaggregation of the social fabric.

Thus, in front of the COVID crisis and its dramatic consequences due to institutional contexts in American countries, and regimes in the Americas before engaging in a reflection on their future in the 21st century. By approaching social protection from a comparatist perspective through the prism of political economy, the question of the forms of protection, social policies and socio-institutional compromises around social protection will be at the center of this round table. The participants’ presentations and discussions will unfold around three main topics:

- How do the weaknesses of the social systems or regimes explain the magnitude of the pandemic shock and its consequences in the Americas?

- How does COVID affect national political compromises in terms of social protection?

- What are the post-COVID perspectives for these social protection regimes in the Americas?