Abstract
AbstractThis chapter concludes the volume on social protection in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa, 1920–2020. The main findings are: (1) Historical evolution—the hundred years from 1920 to 2020 mark the century of the rise of social protection in the four countries. (2) The social construction of the social—all four countries, with the exception of India, have articulated social issues in a generalised way as a social question. (3) Political language—semantics of the social have spread in all four countries. (4) “Multireferentiality”—social protection policies were largely driven and shaped by “non-social” ideas and interests. (5) Transnational diffusion—external ideas have pervaded domestic social protection policies. The chapter closes by thoughts about the future of social protection in middle-income countries.
Highlights
This volume ventures into a largely uncharted territory, enquiring if, when, and how the social question has been raised in four countries over the last hundred years—countries that are better known as “emerging markets” in the early twenty-first century
In addition to our substantive research interest, we seek to contribute to theorising Southern welfare. In this concluding chapter, I1 present the main findings of the country-focused chapters in a comparative perspective and framed by five overarching concepts—historical evolution, social construction, political language, multireferentiality, and transnational diffusion—that build on the theoretical framework developed in Chap
The first finding relates to the historical evolution of social protection: the hundred years from 1920 to 2020 mark the rise of social protection programmes in the four countries
Summary
This volume ventures into a largely uncharted territory, enquiring if, when, and how the social question has been raised in four countries over the last hundred years—countries that are better known as “emerging markets” in the early twenty-first century. There were periods of intensified social policy activity, as in South Africa from 1924 to 1933, Brazil from 1930 to1945, India from 1946 to 1952, China from the 2000s until the early 2010s, and during the 1940s in all four countries. It refers to intellectuals, experts, politicians, and social movements’ articulation of such conditions as a general concern for society to be addressed by the state These articulations may be ahead of the socio- economic conditions of the country, like raising the labour question in a largely agrarian society (as some early critics of social protection in India argued), or they may lag behind, underrating the scale of social problems. Socio-economically defined groups, above all workers, were the centre of the labour question, but countries differed as to which branches of industry were covered by their social insurance programmes (for Brazil, see the historical study by Lewis and Lloyd-Sherlock 2009). State-regulated private protection, such as industrial accident insurance in Brazil in the 1920s, may reflect a social concern of the state
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