Pension Inclusion Moratorium — Closing Argentina's Old-Age Care-Work Pension Gap

Argentina's pension system historically required at least 30 years of registered contributions, a threshold most women could not meet because their working lives were concentrated in informal employment or unpaid domestic and care work. Starting in 2004-05, and extended in 2014 and 2019, the Moratoria Previsional let people who had reached retirement age but lacked sufficient contribution history 'declare' outstanding contribution debt and repay it against future pension payments, in effect converting decades of unpaid work into eligibility. A complementary non-contributory scheme, the Pension Universal para el Adulto Mayor (PUAM), was created in 2016 for those who did not use the moratorium.
The scale of the shift was large and disproportionately benefited women. A 2024 academic review found that 73% of the roughly 2.7 million beneficiaries of the first wave (2004-05) were women, rising to 86% of beneficiaries in the second wave (2010); a province-level case study of San Juan found that pension coverage of the population aged 65 and over rose from 60.75% in 2001 to 91% in 2010. A 2022 World Bank technical report estimated that by 2020, elderly poverty stood at about 11%, versus a counterfactual of roughly 67.8% had the pension transfers not existed — and noted that only 9.9% of women aged 60-64 were independently eligible for a pension without the scheme.
The scheme's record is genuine but mixed. The World Bank report itself criticises the moratorium's 'horizontal inequity' — it granted full pensions regardless of actual contribution history — and its fiscal cost, with Argentina now spending roughly 11.8% of GDP on pensions. Academic sources note that gender equity was a byproduct rather than a designed goal: women had to register as fictitious 'self-employed workers' with backdated contributions rather than being recognised directly for care work. Most consequentially, the moratorium law expired in March 2025 and has not been renewed; Amnesty International has warned that older people, especially women and informal workers, risk losing access to a full pension, since the PUAM fallback pays only 80% of the minimum pension.

Read the full analysis: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/5e249cbe-54c0-54ca-9dbf-1ee2ad23579e/content