Social protection policy in Colombia

Marcela Meléndez, Nicolas Peña Tenjo and Laura Tenjo

No wp-2026-9, WIDER Working Paper Series from World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER)

Abstract: Colombia has a complex legal framework meant to protect the population against basic risks through a combination of contributory and non-contributory social insurance. The population is almost perfectly split between them, with eligibility to participate in the latter determined by poverty. Health insurance works relatively well under both. In contrast, protection against old age works poorly. Only 20 out of every 100 workers fulfil the requirements for a contributory pension because of a high informality rate (56 per cent) and frequent worker transitions in and out of formality.

Keywords: Colombia; Social protection; Insurance; Social assistance; Labour market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-iue
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/Publ ... -policy-Colombia.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp-2026-9

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in WIDER Working Paper Series from World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Siméon Rapin ().