For over 150 years, our countries have successively implemented "modernizing programs"—liberal, industrialist, neoliberal, neo-developmentalist, etc. Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence to infer the persistence of structural inequalities associated with a pattern of underdevelopment that they have been unable to reverse.

The structural reforms of the 1990s, framed within the "Washington Consensus," can be summarized in the formula "less state and more market" (Cortés and Salvia, 2019). These economic reforms were accompanied by a reorientation of state action in the area of ​​social welfare, characterized by the privatization of pension systems, privatizing reforms in basic education and healthcare, and the reduction of social housing programs. Conversely, extensive but targeted social assistance programs were implemented, all policies bound by the principle of subsidiarity (Filgueira, 2015).

These policies acted directly on markets, affecting the distribution of wages and income (Gasparini et al., 2016), and indirectly implied a new territorial order due to the closure of traditional industries, the spatial location of maquiladoras, the closure of railroads that had linked an urban system of small towns, new internal migration processes, and the expansion of cross-border spaces inherited from at least the 19th century, now in a globalized context and connected to drug trafficking (Veiga and Lamshtein, 2015). These different processes revealed not only geographical social inequality but also the fragmentation of state institutions across the territory (Filardo and Merklekn, 2019; Cortés, 2018).

The “progressive shift” observed between 2000 and 2020 implied a change that could be described as “more state and less market,” although it was initially fostered and subsequently restricted by the fiscal space created by the commodities boom. Growth particularly benefited the lower income deciles, while poverty and inequality were simultaneously reduced (ECLAC, 2018). Progress was made in multiple dimensions of well-being: educational coverage increased, and some public services in health, social housing, and living conditions were expanded and improved (Benza and Kessler, 2021). A distinctive feature of this period at the regional level was the expansion of social protection policies: pension coverage reached almost 70% of older adults, and around 25% of households received conditional cash transfers (Cecchini and Atuesta, 2017 (Bentancur and Busquets, 2016)).

The stagnation of the external sector, visible since 2014, and a new wave of neoliberal governments led to a partial reversal of positive trends in growth, income distribution, and well-being (ECLAC, 2022). COVID-19 has accentuated this: setbacks have been recorded not only in poverty reduction but also in health, job quality, housing, and education (Benza and Kessler, 2021). Meanwhile, a significant transfer of wealth to the elites has occurred (Bull and Robles Rivera, 2020), thus consolidating a regressive functional redistribution of material well-being (World Inequality Lab, 2022). In short, the progress made in Latin America during the "progressive turn" was insufficient to resolve the chronic problems associated with inequality and poverty, now exacerbated by the pandemic and the acceleration of technological change in global capitalism.

These phenomena are also discussed on a global scale (Milanovic, 2020). In particular, the polarization of labor markets and the global decline in job quality (Sehnbruch, 2020) indicate that work has lost its capacity as a vector of integration, and unions have diminished as agents that advocate for social rights. In the Latin American case, this decade has further exacerbated the chronic problems of peripheral capitalism's insufficient capacity to productively integrate the population and the historically heterogeneous territories of each country. Therefore, the discussion on new models of development and well-being for the region becomes strategic. The starting point must be the recognition of a matrix of inequality that is simultaneously multidimensional, organized around socially valuable goods (Reygadas, 2004), and that generates multiple disadvantages, although it maintains the central role of work as the organizer of these inequalities. Within this framework, the centrality of "pacts" reemerges. (Bárcena and Prado, 2016) as multi-actor agreements capable of generating a new series of public employment and social protection policies focused on ensuring social cohesion and human flourishing.

The results accumulated by the GT in our work since 2016 have made clear the need to preserve the tradition of studies on structural heterogeneity and social inequality, and at the same time to collaboratively deepen the following lines.

First, it is important to study the link between the region's unequal social structure, government policies, welfare systems, labor markets, and gender and ethnic-racial relations. Analysis of inequalities stemming from social origins, viewed through the lens of social class, has revealed the limitations to social fluidity that define us (Solís and Boado, 2016; Salvia and Piovani, 2018; Pla, 2016). Regarding gender, the overrepresentation of women in jobs with the worst relative conditions, their intermittent career paths, and the stagnation of their labor force participation—referred to as the incomplete gender revolution—have been documented (Goldin, 2006; Esping-Andersen, 2009; Hochschild, 2008).

Secondly, the analysis of the territorial distribution of well-being and inequality (Sellers & Lindström, 2007; Rodrigues, 2010) revealed persistent effects of birthplace and place of residence on both childhood learning processes and educational trajectories. The transition to employment in large urban areas showed systematic differences in opportunities, to the point of highlighting structural discontinuities between slums/settlements/favelas/working-class neighborhoods and middle-class or upper-middle-class residential areas. New urban processes of social space differentiation are emerging due to the actions of the real estate market: the expansion of gated communities, gentrification, and the construction of large-scale social housing complexes. Not only is there an association between markets and life cycles, but also with the benefits of the Social State since these are carried out through the presence in the territory of the different specialized agencies (schools, health centers, care for the elderly, investments in housing, electrification, sanitation or public spaces for leisure and recreation).

This Working Group proposes a multidisciplinary and comparative analysis that recovers the Latin American intellectual tradition on development and inequality to build a multidimensional theoretical framework where the historical-structural patterns of inequalities can be debated, generating contributions to support new public policies that contribute to economic, social and territorial transformation.

As Latin American academics committed to our history, we believe it is urgent and necessary to promote research that rescues the tradition of development analysis as a theoretical basis for the process of economic and social formation in Latin America and that critically updates the challenges of a development style that results in overcoming inequalities.

Underdevelopment and structural inequalities remain central to the theoretical and political debates across our continents, in which one question persists: why, in the context of the enormous capitalist mobilization and concentration deployed over several generations in almost all of Latin America and the Caribbean, have neither policies inspired by the "invisible hand" nor those that advocate for the "regulatory power" of states managed to generate a convergence in development levels or a "trickle-down" of well-being in labor markets or across different territories?

There have been three main responses. According to the neoclassical approach, for a dual economy participating in the global market to achieve a successful convergence process, it must embark on an export-oriented path and pursue economic liberalization through specialization in the production of primary goods with competitive advantages. This will increase the demand for labor and raise the real wages of lower-skilled workers. In turn, this would allow for a deeper process of capitalization and labor absorption in the modern industrial sector, driving the elimination of internal dualism. In the developmentalist model, a country must undertake external opening in order to keep real wages low through two means: increasing labor immigration and/or exporting capital. Both theses, while distinct, agree that, in an "open" economy, if a country manages to grow sufficiently, it can reach a stage of development in which poverty and inequality decrease.

The historical-structuralist approach we adopt proposes that, in the context of an open peripheral economy with an increasingly concentrated accumulation model oriented towards external or high-income markets, the model will foster productive specialization, further segmenting the functioning of the labor market and increasing territorial heterogeneity. The effects of these phenomena negatively impact income distribution, preventing growth from converging into development and increasing population surpluses.

Pioneering studies linked accumulation patterns and the matrix of inequality with the articulation of political, economic and social conditions in which each social formation is reproduced, with the way in which the country relates to and is affected by changes in international conditions (Graciarena, 1976): historical processes, the profile of class stratification, the dynamics of conflict and social alliances, were fundamental to characterizing the processes of economic and distributive development (Furtado, 1967; Pinto, 1976; Prebisch, 1973).

Based on this general framework, this Working Group problematizes the logical relationship between the productive matrix, the labor market, class structure, and inequalities, drawing on the structuralist tradition of situating the study of inequalities within the broader framework of an accumulation model (Bielchowsky, 2016) and territorial segmentations (Pinto, 1970; Zapata, 1977) with a long-term perspective (Braudel, 1958). Class studies from perspectives focused on the segmentation of labor markets emphasize the precarization of labor relations as a structural feature of peripheral societies (1985; Portes and Hoffman, 2003; Pla, Poy, and Salvia, 2022; Solís, Chávez Molina, and Cobos, 2020). We link the successive capitalist mercantile, industrialist, and agro-export production matrices implemented with the types of settlement and infrastructure networks and resources (Soifer, 2017) from which the State ordered the territory, recreating in each cycle a persistent territorial structural heterogeneity (Fernández, Vanoli, and Wilkins, 2022). Throughout the 20th century, the different models of the welfare state (Martínez-Franzoni, 2008; Blofed, Filgueira, Giambruno, & Martínez-Franzoni, 2021) deployed in the territory provided institutional solutions and assumed accumulated and contradictory structural constraints of development models (Sellers & Lindström, 2007; Rodrigues, 2010).

We define inequality as the result of an “accumulation of interrelated forms of exclusion” (Bayón, 2015: 19), linked to unequal access to resources both in the market and through public services or community networks, processes that are territorially determined and mediated by microsocial dynamics with consequences for life trajectories and biographies (Oliveira and Mora-Salas, 2018). At this point, inequality is linked to the social reproduction of domestic groups, emphasizing, from a gender perspective, the ways in which the spheres that constitute well-being are articulated, among which the family is central, and care work the main component (Eguía and Ortale, 2004; Oliveira and Salles, 2000).

Based on the above, our Working Group proposes three lines of work whose research will prioritize comparative analyses between nations and subnational territories, with a historical perspective, based on synchronic and diachronic views, and through the use of mixed methodologies (information and qualitative and quantitative techniques).

1) Social Structure and Labor Markets. This study proposes to examine inequalities from multidisciplinary approaches and a gender perspective, within the context of changes in production matrices (economic and occupational structure), labor markets (job quality), welfare systems, government policies (economic, social, and population-related), stratification systems (class, social strata, and other stratification factors, such as ethnic and racial factors), and reproductive structures (demographic and reproductive behaviors). In addition to reviewing the evolution of social structure features from different perspectives, the study will seek to situate individual and household trajectories within the current regional context, using a comparative approach.

2) Territory, Well-being, and Inequalities. The objective is to contribute to the interdisciplinary analysis of the formation and change of territorial structures of well-being between the last quarter of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, estimating their effects on inequality. It will explore the articulation between development models, settlement policies, and stratification as a widespread form of structural heterogeneity. It will examine their impact on the territorial distribution of health, education, and housing services, and their effects on poverty and migration. It will pay particular attention to cross-border areas.

3) Methodologies for observing inequalities. This axis is transversal to the previous two and seeks to strengthen methodologies for the comparative study of inequalities. Through training and peer technical support, information sources will be standardized across nations and territories, and research skills in qualitative and quantitative techniques will be strengthened. Census, documentary, and household survey sources will be complemented with satellite information, small area estimation, and machine learning methods (Garrett et al., 2013; Guadarrama et al., 2017).

Undergraduate and graduate students will be integrated into the work to foster their research training and guide the development of their theses. Likewise, activities will be carried out to connect with civil society actors who have relationships with members of our Working Group, as well as with other CLACSO Working Groups addressing similar issues, as specified in the work plan.