Non-contributory pensions have become extremely popular in the last decade, with 78 developing countries currently distributing money in this way, and their acclaimed impacts are increasingly celebrated. Studies have found them to contribute not only to ‘obvious’ needs such as increased consumption and income security but also to investments in productivity, social relationships, health, increased access to credit and savings, while it has become common to claim that they contribute to intangible goals such as dignity and citizenship. The danger of some of these claims is that they assume that wellbeing is heavily responsive to monetary wealth, rather than other areas. To study this, an ethnographic methodology, based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews, was employed in two rural communities located in the La Paz department in the highland Altiplano region of Bolivia close to Lake Titicaca. Our analysis shows that while the Renta Dignidad increases older persons’ livelihood security, its contributions to other areas where non-contributory pensions are claimed to have major impacts, such as productive investment, health care and relational wellbeing, are actually relatively limited. The policy implication of this is that a more integral approach needs to be adopted to older persons' wellbeing, going beyond cash transfers to greater efforts to bring health-care services to older people in remote rural areas.

Gender inequalities are a key issue for most pension systems in Latin America. Contributory pension schemes that link benefit entitlements to work and earnings tend to reflect in the benefits they offer the gender gaps that prevail in the labour market. This deepened with the implementation of individual private accounts as part of structural pension reforms in a number of countries. This article evaluates how recent pension policies, including measures geared to coverage expansion and so-called pension ‘re-reforms’, have addressed gender gaps in pensions in four Latin American countries. It shows that the expansion of non-contributory pensions and a greater emphasis on redistribution are important for the protection of older women in a context of gendered labour markets and the unequal distribution of paid and unpaid work between women and men. Looking at the cases of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Chile, the article identifies progress but also the persistence of gender gaps in pensions and emphasises the need for further measures to promote adequate social protection for older women.

This study investigated the determinants of Successful Ageing (SA) in a sample of 4,151 Peruvians aged between 65 and 80 years and living in poverty. A key contribution of this study is to combine the conceptual appeal of SA to measure wellbeing in old age with the multi-dimensional poverty counting approach developed in the economic literature. This setting allows for moving beyond the dichotomy of successful and usual ageing to take advantage of the full distribution of success along a set of dimensions of wellbeing. The data are drawn from the Encuesta de Salud y Bienestar del Adulto Mayor (ESBAM) survey, which is the baseline to evaluate the non-contributory public pension programme Pension 65. Nine indicators of SA have been used to assess the dimensions of physical health, functioning, cognition, emotional health and life satisfaction. The variables associated with a higher number of satisfied indicators were male gender, younger old age, literate, employed, low food insecurity, good nutritional status, normal blood pressure, absence of disabilities, non-smoker, empowerment, good self-esteem, absence of mental disability and less frequent contact with a social network. From a policy perspective, the results of this study report a remarkably stable effect of three variables affecting SA that can be relatively easy to measure, monitor and influence by public intervention. These variables are food security, nutrition quality and self-esteem.