The life stories we tell in this book, the social conditions we interpret and the trajectories we analyze occur in territories of Latin America. According to various studies, this is the most unequal region in the world. Notwithstanding occasional periods of economic growth, inequality persists and is reproduced over time, causing serious problems and obstacles for the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals looking toward 2030. Governments, political movements, civil organizations and individuals have all sought to combat and bring an end to poverty in a myriad of ways through programs, plans and unequal investment. However, despite these efforts, poverty persists throughout Latin America. Poverty is reproduced as wealth is reproduced. While not unique to Latin America, the ongoing mechanisms that generate poverty and wealth are entrenched in the region’s economic, productive and social regimes and their systems of wealth accumulation.
The chapters in this volume reconstruct an image of what it is like to live and work in poverty at different stages of life in four different countries: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Mexico—during the same time frame. This shared period of time does not imply shared ideologies, public policies or a similar management of poverty in these countries.
This chapter first traces a brief overview of the Latin American scene to show structural features of social inequality and poverty. Second, it shares the conceptual tools used in the research. Third, and finally, it outlines the structure of this book.
Socio-economic Context
Latin America, on a continental and historical level, has experimented with numerous colonial and developmental models, mostly viewed today as ranging along the neoliberal, neodevelopmental and post-neoliberal spectrum. However, it should be remembered that each country has been through cycles with specific local processes linked to political traditions, social policy development and different relationships to the global market and world geopolitics. Sometimes these processes have more or less in common with other countries in the region.
According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL, 2016), inequality is mainly caused by the heterogeneous structure of the economic and productive systems, whereby sectors of high productivity coexist with sectors of low productivity, often in huge metropolitan centers (Chavez Molina, 2015). CEPAL (2016) claims that “The link which connects this heterogeneous productive system and its inherent inequality in terms of access and quality of employment to the acute inequality of household income is the labor market. Data on structural heterogeneity reveal that a high percentage of jobs (43% in 2013) are concentrated in sectors of low productivity.”
These lower sectors generally do not demand much from workers in terms of technical skills and offer jobs which can be characterized as informal, low paid and with little or no access to social security protections. According to Bárcena and Prado (2016), inequalities caused and reproduced by the productive structure overflow from this sphere, extend into labor and social spheres and are interwoven with inequalities of gender, ethnicity, race and age. Hence, there is a notably higher percentage of young people, women and nondominant ethnic groups in conditions of poverty.
Although poverty and inequality have persisted in structural terms in our societies, several indicators show that the evolution of recent decades has not occurred uniformly. Subsequent to the well-known “structural adjustment” suffered by Latin American economies throughout the neoliberal agenda of the 1990s, the early 2000s saw a post-neoliberal turnaround in some countries of the region. This occurred in both Argentina and Brazil, where widespread measures were undertaken to combat poverty and inequality (Pérez Sáinz, 2014). Other countries such as Mexico, on the other hand, have remained faithful to the dominant neoliberal agenda.
The early 2000s saw notable economic changes throughout the world, and although Latin America and the Caribbean retained their standing as the most unequal region, the Gini1 index showed some gains compared to the previous decade. Improved distribution of wealth was registered in 15 of the 17 Latin American countries with the exception of Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. This trend took place within a context of sustained economic growth and the reduction of poverty in the region (Jiménez, 2015). It is worth noting, however, that these statistics allow for a homogenized overview which does not reveal the specific reality of each country and certain internal populations which have continued to remain in poverty.
One of the most evident expressions of inequality, as shown by CEPAL (2018), is the income gap found at the extremes of wealth distribution. According to data from a survey of households in 2016, the richest quintile received 45% of income wealth, while the average income of the lowest quintile received only 6% of income wealth. Moreover, the income of the richest 10% is approximately equivalent to the lower three quintiles which make up 60% of the population. The same source also demonstrates that the income gap between the groups of highest and lowest incomes has been reduced since the beginning of the early 2000s. Between 2000 and 2012, the income of the first quintile went from 4.8% to 6.2% while that of the fifth quintile decreased from 50.7% to 45.0%. This trend toward lowering inequality continued from 2012 to 2016 but, to a lesser degree, causing some analysts to refer to a standstill in the process of the reduction of income inequality.
Another interesting finding from the Gini index2 is that Latin America showed an average value of 0.467 in 2016; however, when we compare three of the countries under study, Brazil and Mexico are found to have values over 0.500, while Argentina shows values less than 0.400 (CEPAL, 2018).
The reduction in Gini values was accompanied by a decrease in poverty, notably in urban areas, from 2002 to 2008. Economic expansion resulted in an increase in employment together with a moderate increase in real incomes for households. This together with a series of social policy measures brought down the figures for poverty by 25% and extreme poverty3 by 33%. The global economic crisis of 2008–2009 affected economic growth, but measures for protecting wages and jobs, together with a speedy recovery in growth, meant that poverty did not increase and continued to decline in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Fuentes Knight, 2014). Data show 45.9% of the Latin American population in poverty in 2002 and 12.4% in extreme poverty, with figures reaching their lowest point in 2014 showing 28.5% and 8.2%, respectively. However, this promising trend began to slow down and even show a reversal in later years. In 2015 the figures rose to 29.8% and 9% and then again in 2016 and 2017 with 30.7% of the population in poverty and 10% in extreme poverty (CEPAL, 2018).
Age and gender are key factors in the incidence of poverty and extreme poverty, as revealed in our interviews with girls, boys, adolescents and adult women. In Latin America, children 0–14 years make up the largest category of persons in conditions of poverty, reaching a figure of 60% (almost double that of person of 60 years or older). Children are also 50% more likely to suffer extreme poverty than the rest of the population. The reduction in the poverty rate during the period 2002–2006 did not affect all age groups in the same way. For children it was reduced by little more than a fifth, while for most adults of working age, there was almost a 50% reduction. Therefore, as of 2016, 47 out of 100 children under 15 continue to live in conditions of poverty and 17 out of 100 continue to live in conditions of extreme poverty (CEPAL, 2018).
As regards gender variables, the CEPAL data on poverty and extreme poverty did not show a substantial difference in aggregated rates: 31.3% of women compared to 30.1% of men were in poverty, while the extreme poverty rates were 10.2% and 9.8%, respectively. However, there are notable differences when certain life stages are studied; a higher rate of poverty was found in women 15–29 and 30–59 years (CEPAL, 2018).
As mentioned above, the labor market functions as a space where the major effects of structural inequality are found, where the rewards of productivity are distributed, where employment and wages are stratified and where there is access or obstacles to social security (Bárcena and Prado, 2016). The period 2002–2013 saw a notable reduction in unemployment (2.8%) across the region, with women and young people, who had systematically suffered higher than average unemployment, benefiting from this trend. However, the current recession in some parts of the region and low growth in others has effected a reversal of this trend, with a slight increase in unemployment for the first time since 2009 (the second since 2002). The decrease in urban employment by 0.3% has led to more self-generated work which ...