What Argentina’s Plan Jefes Can Teach Us about the Job Guarantee

This chapter examines Argentina's Plan Jefes—a direct job creation program largely modeled on the Job Guarantee (JG) proposal developed in the US—and its subsequent reform. The objective is to assess its impact on macroeconomic stability, unemployment, and poor women—by far the largest group of beneficiaries of the program. With respect to macroeconomic stability, the chapter argues that Plan Jefes exhibits some of the key stabilizing features of JG  that have been suggested in the literature, even though it was not designed as an unconditional job guarantee for all. With respect to its gender impact, the argument is that direct job creation programs have the unique capacity to undermine prevailing structures that produce and reproduce poverty and gender disparities. The paper examines survey evidence based on narratives by female participants in Jefes to assess these potentially transformative aspects of the JG  proposal.

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