COVID-19 in Latin America: Covid-19 in Latin America: The role of social protections for households with children

这项研究项目分析了新冠肺炎疫情对拉丁美洲八个国家有子女家庭的社会经济影响，以及社会保护的干预作用。拉丁美洲的不平等程度很高，劳动力的非正规性和城市化程度很高，大流行死亡人数和经济影响对拉美的打击尤其严重。然而，该区域各国的社会保护对策有很大不同，从巴西的大规模紧急援助计划到墨西哥几乎没有额外的现金转移援助。鉴于儿童的特殊脆弱性(拉丁美洲几乎一半的儿童在大流行病之前就已经生活在贫困中)，以及他们的福祉一直不那么明显的事实(由于体校关闭和居家避难所政策)，有必要对有孩子的家庭进行系统调查。然而，到目前为止，我们还没有它们。我们计划填补这一空白。过去一年的经验使我们能够系统地研究与以下相关的变量：(I)社会疏远造成的社会经济冲击；(Ii)为应对这种冲击而实施的社会保护计划；以及(Iii)这些计划如何影响和减轻对有子女家庭的福祉的不利影响。我们将在八个拉丁美洲国家对儿童照顾者进行具有代表性的调查，每个国家对大约1500名受访者进行电话调查。这将为我们提供一个大约12,000个病例的汇集数据集，使我们能够控制各种个人、家庭、社区和国家一级的因素。我们将具体审查：a.大流行病期间现金转移、实物转移(主要是食品)和服务(主要是保健)的实际获得和充分性；b.社会保护对主要福祉指标的影响，方法是比较有社会保护和不有社会保护的儿童和家庭，以及社会保护的充分性和质量不同；c.社会保护在家庭是否愿意/有能力遵守社会疏远措施、归属问题和对政府作用的看法方面的作用。我们的调查将能够检验社会政策和现金转移文献中的各种假设，这不仅将有助于我们对社会保护、福祉和认知的理论理解，而且对于劳动力非正规程度高、国家能力较低的国家未来任何社会经济冲击准备的政策设计也将至关重要。我们的研究项目将由首席研究员Merike Blofield和哥斯达黎加大学比较社会政策教授和洪堡教授Juliana Martínez Franzoni(2021年)和拉丁美洲社会保护方面的领先专家Juliana Martínez Franzoni进行。

This research project analyzes the socio-economic fall-out of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the intervening role of social protections, on families with children in eight Latin American countries. Latin America, with high levels of inequality, labor informality, and urbanization, has been particularly hard hit by both pandemic deaths as well as economic effects. The social protection responses of countries in the region, however, have varied dramatically, from a massive emergency assistance plan in Brazil to virtually no additional cash transfer aid in Mexico. Given the particular vulnerability of children (almost half of children in Latin America lived in poverty already before the pandemic) and the fact that their wellbeing has been less visible (with physical school closures and shelter-at-home policies), systematic surveys of households with children are imperative. Yet, to date, we do not have them. We plan to fill this gap. The experience of this past year allows us to systematically study in real time variables related to (i) the socioeconomic shock created by social distancing, (ii) the social protection programs deployed to cope with this shock; and (iii) how these programs affected and mitigated adverse effects on the wellbeing of households with children. We will conduct representative surveys of caregivers of children, in eight Latin American countries, with phone surveys of approximately 1,500 respondents per country. This will provide us with a pooled dataset of about 12,000 cases, allowing us to control for a broad variety of individual, household, community and national-level factors. We will specifically examine:a. The actual access to and sufficiency of cash transfers, in-kind transfers (primarily food) and services (primarily health care) during the pandemic b. The effects of social protection on key indicators of well-being, by comparing children and families with and without social protection and with different sufficiency and quality of social protection c. The role of social protection in households’ willingness/ability to adhere to social distancing measures, issues of attribution and perceptions of role of government. Our surveys will be able to test a variety of hypotheses from the social policy and cash transfer literature, which will not only contribute to our theoretical understanding of social protections, wellbeing and perceptions, but will also be critical for policy design for any future socioeconomic shock preparedness in countries with high levels of labor informality and lower state capacity.Our research project will be conducted by the principal investigator, Merike Blofield, and Juliana Martínez Franzoni, Professor of Comparative Social Policy and Humboldt Chair (2021) at the University of Costa Rica, and leading expert in social protection in Latin America.