Abstract
The article analyzes the social protection policy for people with disabilities in Brazil. It describes the patterns of demand and eligibility for Continued Benefit of Social Assistance (Benefício de Prestação Continuada - BPC) in the 1996-2014 period. The article argues that BPC is a direct result of the social pact achieved by the Brazilian Federal Constitution of 1988. BPC is a social assistance benefit consisting in an unconditional and monthly transference of the equivalent of a minimum wage, to poor people with deficiency and elders with more than 65 years. Disabled person eligibility depends on means-test, and social and medical evaluation by public bureaucracy. The research strategy was based on time series, and cross-sectional data collection and analysis. Dummy qualitative variables were also used to describe the pattern of demand and eligibility. The article demonstrates that BPC has provided income to disabled and elder people. However, systematic barriers were identified to disabled people's access to BPC. The work suggests that the pattern of refusal could be associated to a means testing application by street-level-bureaucracy. In this sense, the work draws attention to the necessary revision of street-level-bureaucracy tools and procedures to increase BPC positive discrimination.
Highlights
The purpose of this article is to describe the pattern of demand and eligibility of people with disabilities to the Continued Benefit of Social Assistance (BPC)
The inclusion of new beneficiaries in BPC was sustainable over the decades of 1990 and 2010, as shown in Graph 1, indicating that governments with different macroeconomic guidelines ratified the constitution for the new policy of social assistance
Graph 1 shows the expected reduction in the quantity of people covered by life annuity (RMV) because of the suspension of new entrants for the implementation of BPC in 1996 and the deaths of beneficiaries of the inclusion policy introduced in the 1970s
Summary
The purpose of this article is to describe the pattern of demand and eligibility of people with disabilities to the Continued Benefit of Social Assistance (BPC). The Federal Constitution of 1988 overcame the limitations of the contributory model governing access to social protection to linking the person to the formal market work[1]. The article challenges the structural-functional theoretical perspective for which the development of social assistance in Brazil has responded to the logic of accumulation and the need for reproduction workforce[2]. This perspective does not recognize the role of democracy, which puts social protection at the center of the public agenda, as observed in other contexts[3], dissociating it from the strict requirements of the accumulation and management of the workforce. The structural-functional theoretical perspective dispenses the necessary discussion of the advances and limitations of sectoral policy innovations that the Federal Constitution of 1988 allowed in the last three decades
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
