ABSTRACT
The chapter analyses the social policy in Latin America in a context of emerging welfare states. It pays attention to the path followed by the most developed welfare regimes of Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. It considers their historical formation and the reforms produced by the Latin American left-wing governments of the twenty-first century. It explains that those reforms intended to substitute a corporative social security regime based mainly on segmentation of benefits and means-tested programmes to fight poverty with a universalistic welfare state with an institutional and redistributive nature. Changes of welfare policies are considered from a neo-institutional perspective, in which reforms are studied from the viewpoint of two paradigms, rational institutionalism and historical institutionalism, paying particular attention to the path dependence theory.
