Carmelo Mesa-Lago is distinguished service professor emeritus of economics and Latin American studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published about ninety books in seven languages across thirty-nine countries and received many awards, including the International Labour Organization Decent Work Research Prize (shared with Nelson Mandela) for his work on social protection in the world.

Any social scientist who consciously sets out to explore, to understand, and to compare the social security systems of five Latin American nations deserves simultaneously to be encouraged and cautioned. . . . Yet Carmelo Mesa-Lago has not only undertaken the job; he has done so thoroughly, rigorously, and usefully. Nor is his study simply descriptive; on the contrary, it is a truly comparative exercise that presents enormous amounts of detail on each country and then compares them vis-ˆ-vis degree, scope, and depth of coverage.