Costa Rica‘s Social Policy Response to Covid-19: Strengthening Universalism During the Pandemic?
With its strong public healthcare system and social security regime, Costa Rica was better prepared to face the Covid-19 pandemic than most countries in the Global South. However, the pandemic hit at a time when its social policy regime had already been weakened by three decades of neoliberal insp...
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| Autores principales: | , |
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| Formato: | informe científico |
| Lenguaje: | English |
| Publicado: |
Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) Projektnummer 374666841 – SFB 1342
2021
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | https://www.socialpolicydynamics.de/ https://repositorio.iis.ucr.ac.cr/handle/123456789/741 |
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| Sumario: | With its strong public healthcare system and social security regime, Costa Rica was better prepared to face the
Covid-19 pandemic than most countries in the Global South. However, the pandemic hit at a time when its social
policy regime had already been weakened by three decades of neoliberal inspired policies. Since the first
Covid-19 case was identified in March 2020, the country implemented a series of legislative and institutional
measures in different social policy areas that sought to build on the country’s institutional heritage to provide social
protection to its population. In this report, we analyze whether these measures represented more focalized
temporary “band-aid” measures or were inspired by the historic commitment to universal social policy. For this,
we first describe the social policy measures taken during the Covid-19 crisis. Then we focus on three key policy
areas – health, pensions, social assistance, to analyze whether these measures positively or negatively affect
universalism in Costa Rica, understood as a multidimensional concept. We find that Costa Rica’s initial quick, and
later unsure measures took two paths: A first set of measures in explicit response to Covid-19, and a second set
was aimed at guaranteeing the continuity of the country’s universal social security system. |
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