Inter-American Award for Research on Social Security 2008

Each year the CISS organizes the Inter-American Award for Research on Social Security in two categories: Undergraduate thesis and free research and Postgraduate thesis (master and doctoral level). This year the winner of the first place in the Postgraduate category was Antonio Carlos Estima, the second place was for Evania Maria Oliveira. The third place in the Postgraduate thesis category, as well as, the Graduate Thesis and free research category was declared deserted.

We invite students and researchers to submit their works (thesis and publishable papers). Detailed guidelines can be found at CISS’ webpage


Here is a summary of the works winners.

First place:

In his work “Performance Assessment of the Program of Disability Benefits of the National Institute of Social Security/INSS, Management Branch of Florianópolis, SC, 2000-2002” Antonio Carlos Estima notices that since the 80s social security systems have faced an increasing demand for disability benefits without a corresponding increase in the required resources to run the program. In this framework the author perform a study case of the INSS’ Program of Disability Benefits in Florianópolis, SC, Brazil aimed to assess its performance.
The program was defined as a set of practices adopted by the Brazilian social security system towards a social policy of just allocation of benefits in the country. Social justice and distributive arguments were considered the guiding principles of this policy. However, author´s hypothesis is that the allocation of resources does not always follow such principles. To test the local functioning of the program the author uses econometric models of inflow and outflows of benefits.
After performing his analysis, he finds that differences in the performance among the agencies are not only explained by morbidity characteristics of its beneficiary population. Local labor market characteristics, complexity of local morbidity profile, as well as the possibility of fraudulent benefit concessions make possible the identification of more restrictive Agencies and more indulgent Agencies regarding concession and maintenance of benefits. The study also allows identifying two opportunistic behaviors generated by the system: “adverse selection” and “moral-hazard”.

Second Place:

Evania Maria Oliveira in her work “Social Protection and Informal workers in Brazil” analyses Brazilian protection policy as an element of inclusion for informal workers. She focuses on peddlers in the city of Fortaleza in the state of Caerá, Brazil since this city is one of the two main touristic places in Caerá. Most of the peddlers are excluded from the possibility to participate in the formal labor market and relay in merchandise sale as a work alternative.
She finds that informal activity is used among peddlers in Fortaleza as the source of occupation and income and in most of the cases as a work alternative and surviving strategy. Although many peddlers desire to have social protection, they lack capacity to pay for this right as they face unstable and low income. The author points that given the phenomenon of social exclusion of thousands of Brazilians, the construction of a democratic and effective model of public services is required. Such model should be aimed to provide public services of quality. She also notices that it is needed to construct a new relationship between social protection and informal workers to define projects and government decisions with priority for these workers. The study shows that the country need to change the profile of economic growth to restrain the growth of the informal sector and to consolidate a democracy with social inclusion.