Beyond Material Deprivation

CHAPTER 8 | Privatization and Social Exclusion in Latin America

Privatizations have a bad reputation with Latin Americans, mostly because of the exclusionary outcomes they represent for employees fired from privatized firms. However, they may have an inclusionary effect as well, by expanding the scope of the population served and improving the quality of services produced. High-quality public regulation is crucial for determining which of these two impacts is greater.

CHAPTER 9 | Exclusion and Politics

In spite of the formal equality of political rights guaranteed in national constitutions, the democratic systems in the region often limit the formal channels of influence of some groups within the population. Social mobilization has the potential to increase the voice of the excluded and to make the formal political system pay attention to their demands. This suggests that social movements can be more part of the solution than part of the problem for the region’s evolving democracies.

CHAPTER 10 | Social Exclusion and Violence

The judicial and law enforcement systems of countries in the region have only weakly adapted to the dramatic changes that Latin American and Caribbean societies have experienced in the last twenty-five years. The excluded, who face increasing violence and insecurity in their daily lives, lack adequate access to justice and economic and physical security.

CHAPTER 11 | Exclusion and Financial Services

Financial inclusion holds important benefits for excluded groups of the population, facilitating savings, helping families smooth consumption, and reducing the limitations of dependence on volatile cash flows. In spite of these advantages, empirical studies have found that the fraction of poor households with savings accounts is much lower than that of nonpoor households.

CHAPTER 12 | Modern Forms of Program Delivery and Exclusion

Lack of civil registration documents makes entire segments of the population “invisible.” Interestingly, modern forms of social program delivery often make possession of official identification documents a strict requirement for program participation. This suggests that more sophisticated targeting needs to be complemented with civil registration campaigns to avoid excluding targeted groups from the benefits of these programs.

Material deprivation is one of the crucial outcomes of exclusion, but it is just one aspect of the deprivations suffered by the excluded. As a dynamic process, social exclusion affects all dimensions of social life in ways that limit the ability of the excluded to function and, therefore, to acquire and use capabilities that are valuable in a market economy. Not only do the excluding features of societies affect the behavior of the excluded and curtail their access to and use of material resources, but they also restrict access to the formal and informal institutions that provide services and opportunities to included groups.

This is not a recent discovery. Poverty studies use a poverty line that refers to an income level below which families cannot fully participate in society as a consequence of lack of resources, and the concept of multiple deprivations has been used at least since Townsend’s seminal 1979 study of poverty in Britain. However, as Burchardt, Le Grand, and Piachaud (2002) point out, even if it is clear that the excluded suffer deprivations for causes other than low incomes, most research in the area fails to reflect these other elements.

Facing the challenge of social exclusion and advancing inclusive policies requires a deeper understanding of these other dimensions of exclusion. Addressing all these dimensions, however, goes well beyond the scope of what this report and its authors can reasonably attempt. Rather than try to address comprehensively all of the dimensions, this section focuses a spotlight on the role played by certain policies and institutions in producing or combating social exclusion.

The following chapters focus on five specific issues that, to some extent, have been considered key culprits in the “in or out” debate about social exclusion in policy circles. In particular, they focus on privatizations, social movements, crime and violence, access to financial services, and lack of documentation, and show how the dynamics in each case follow specific paths that are not necessarily consistent with conventional wisdom.

For instance, looking at policies such as privatizations, measures aimed at increasing access to financial services, and provision of documentation through the lens of social exclusion shows that there is often a failure to understand how the different dimensions of exclusion interact and change the impact of policies for excluded groups. Privatizations might have an exclusionary impact for the laid-off employees of privatized public enterprises, but also might have surprising inclusive impacts through the expansion of service coverage of the new private firms. Disbursing social transfers through debit cards can, under certain conditions, not only increase the income of recipient families, but also increase the ability of these families to open and use savings accounts. More sophisticated targeting methods might have a surprising exclusionary impact in situations in which excluded groups of the population do not have access to civil registration.

Political and electoral systems that exclude disadvantaged groups of the population reduce those groups’ ability to influence government actions through “normal” political channels and open the door to the emergence of contentious politics and social movements. Geographical segregation increases the exposure of disadvantaged groups to crime and violence, both because the rich retreat into gated communities with private security and because the disadvantaged lack the social, economic, and political resources needed to access the preventive and corrective forces of the judicial system and the police.

It is hoped that these examples will help other researchers and the policy community deepen the understanding of the societal traits that shape social exclusion, its determinants, and its dynamics.