This study highlights the interaction between social protection programs and labour markets in the Latin America region. It presents new evidence on the limited coverage of existing programmes and emphasizes the challenges caused by high informality for achieving universal social protection for old age income, for health, for unemployment risks and for anti poverty safety nets. It identifies interaction effects between SP programs and the behavioural responses of workers, firms and social protection providers, which can further undermine efforts to expand coverage, summarising evidence from recent work across the region. It argues for a re-design of financing to eliminate cross subsidies between members of contributory programmes and subsidies that effectively tax income from formal employment. Instead, it advocates well-targeted, tax-funded tapered subsidies to provide incentives to the savings efforts of low income workers, coupled with an effective safety net for the extreme poor who have no capacity to contribute to financing their own social protection arrangements. It also argues for the consolidation of programmes and harmonisation of benefits packages across different insurers. The book develops an overall conceptual framework and presents in-depth analysis of the main SP sectors of pensions, health, unemployment insurance and safety net transfers.

In high-income countries, the percent of the population covered under mandatory old-age pension programs is typically high but often incomplete; in low- and middle-income countries, coverage is low and even stagnant. At the same time, older people are less able to rely on family and community support as a result of growing urbanization and migration. And low-income workers and the poor simply cannot save enough to prepare for their old age. As a response, many countries are considering or have already implemented various forms of retirement income transfers aiming to guarantee a minimum level of income during old age. Despite the growing popularity of these programs, research assessing their success has been limited. 'Closing the Coverage Gap: The Role of Social Pensions and Other Retirement Income Transfers' brings together a group of renowned academics, policy analysts, and policy makers working in the area of pensions and public policy. They discuss how social pensions and other retirement income transfers can be used to close the coverage gap of mandatory pension systems: how they operate, when they can be appropriate, and how to make them work. The book reviews the experiences of low-, middle-, and high-income countries with the design and implementation of retirement income transfers. The book analyzes design issues related to financing, incentives, targeting mechanisms, and administration, and also identifies the role of promising instruments such as matching contributions to reach parts of the informal sector.