Intergenerational Financial Transfers across Seven Cities in Latin America and the Caribbean: The Intersection of Gender and Proximity 1

INTRODUCTIONLatin American and Caribbean countries are ageing rapidly but countries differ in their pace of demographic transition with Barbados and Cuba classified as very advanced while Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, and Mexico are at an advanced stage (Saad, 2011). There are, however, some common patterns in the ageing process; older adults are disproportionately female and increasingly represented in urban areas (United Nations (UN), 2009; Huenchuan, 2010). Countries in the region also share a commonality of population movement, typically younger cohorts, through internal intra-urban, and international, migration (Cerrutti and Bortencello, 2003; Nam, 2009). As shown in Table 1, international migration is more common within Mexico and Cuba, relative to other countries in this study.This geographic separation can present challenges for older adults as the family unity, typically adult children secondary to a spouse, is the main source of support for older adults (Rawlins, 1999; Cavlo and Williamson, 2008; Agree and Glaser, 2009). Within Latin America and the Caribbean however, as in other developing regions, migration is often a household-based economic strategy (Chamberlain, 1999; Jelin and Diaz-Munoz, 2003), as a means of meeting the household's material needs. Few studies, however, have examined the role of geographic proximity for support transfers to older adults in the region (De Vos, Solis, and Montes de Oca, 2004; De Vos, 2012; Quashie and Zimmer, 2013; Quashie, 2015; Lorca and Ponce, 2015).Further distance between parents and children may, however, be more or less important for upward flows of economic support to older adults, depending on the nature of institutional support for older adults, and the overall economic contexts in their place of residence. Latin American and Caribbean countries differ considerably in their standards of living and formal systems of income protection for older adults (Mesa-Lago, 2008). As shown in Table 1, the countries under study differed in their levels of socio-economic development in the year 2000, the period of data collection. Barbados showed the highest GDP per capita at $US 11,658, and Cuba, the lowest at $US 2,750, in 2000. Although not directly related to GDP per capita, pension coverage for older adults also differs across countries with Uruguay, Brazil, and Barbados having the highest levels of pension coverage, largely due to their combination of contributory and non-contributory pension systems, while Mexico reported the lowest (Pettinato and Diaz-Cassou, 2005; Arza, 2012). In Cuba, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the elderly were among the poorest social groups in the decade of the 1990s, due to economic instability and contractions in social welfare (Mesa-Lago and Vidal-Alejandro, 2010).Despite country-level differences in efforts to mitigate gender differences in later life economic security, gender disparities in labour force participation and gender differences in the statutory ages of pension entitlement unequivocally influence gender gaps in pension coverage. In all countries, women have lower rates of pension coverage relative to men. Of all the countries in this study, for which data are available, Mexico has the widest, and Uruguay the smallest, gender gap in pension coverage (Arza, 2012).The intersection of these trends in population ageing and population mobility, within diverse economic and social welfare contexts, present different possibilities for family based intergenerational relations across the region.Research on intergenerational family support, and its gendered dimensions, within Latin America and the Caribbean is expanding. The existing research, however, has mostly focused on single countries (Camarano, Kanso, Mello, and Pasinato, 2005; Gomes, 2007; Lorca and Ponce, 2015), coresidence (De Vos 2000; Andrade and De Vos 2002; VanWey and Cebulko, 2007), and with few exceptions (Saad, 2005; Glaser et al. …