Trust, social protection, and compliance: Moral hazard in Latin America during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Political trust is an important predictor of compliance with government policies, especially in the face of natural disasters or public health emergencies. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, multiple studies related political trust to increased compliance with mobility restrictions. Yet these findings come mostly from high-income countries where political trust and wealth correlate positively. In Latin America, both variables correlate negatively, allowing for better testing of competing explanations. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that in Latin America wealth and, counterintuitively, low political trust predict increased compliance. To understand mechanisms, we decompose political trust and wealth into underlying predictors (social protection, corruption, and education) and reinsert them into the model. While education, as a wealth proxy, predicts decreased mobility across all periods, social protection, which was the strongest predictor of political trust, relates significantly to increased mobility, but only at the beginning of the lockdown prior to distribution of emergency support. This suggests the existence of a public health moral hazard early in the pandemic, whereby citizens who benefited previously from government benefits may have been more risk tolerant in the face of the COVID-19 threat. We interpret these findings within the context of the region's recent "inclusionary turn." Future studies should explore the distinct relationships between political trust, risk perception, and compliance, especially in low- and middle-income countries, and their implications for policy responses to national emergencies.

The impact of COVID-19 on Venezuelan migrants' access to health: A qualitative study in Colombian and Peruvian cities.

This research seeks to understand how COVID-19 has affected access to healthcare among migrants in Latin American cities. Using ethnographic research methods, we engaged with Venezuelans living in conditions of informality in four Colombian cities-Barranquilla, Cucuta, Riohacha, and Soacha-and three Peruvian cities-Lima, Trujillo, and Tumbes. We conducted 130 interviews of both Venezuelan migrants and state and non-governmental actors within the healthcare ecosystems of these cities. We found that forced migrants from Venezuela in both Colombia and Peru face common obstacles along their access trajectories to healthcare, which we summarize as legal, financial, and relating to discrimination and information asymmetry. By limiting effective access to care during the pandemic, these obstacles have also affected migrants' ability to cover the costs of basic needs, particularly food and housing. Our study also found a prevalent reliance on alternative forms of care, such as telemedicine, easy-to-access pharmacies, and extralegal care networks. We conclude that COVID-19 has exacerbated preexisting conditions of informality and health inequities affecting Venezuelan migrants in Colombia and Peru.