Reforming Pensions in Developing and Transition Countries: Trends, Debates and Impacts

In the recent globalization period, pension systems have featured as one of the most dynamic areas of social policy reform and attracted widespread attention from scholars and policymakers. In the 1990s, after years of reform impasse, a number of industrialized countries (for example Germany, Italy and Sweden) introduced substantial pension reforms, while others have recently implemented reform amid widespread popular contestation (France, Greece). A set of developing and transition countries as diverse as Peru, Nigeria and Uzbekistan (Table 1.1) have radically reformed their public pension systems, usually involving a shift towards more market-based schemes through the introduction of privately administered pension funds based on individual capitalization. Other countries have been more cautious in their reform efforts or have postponed major reforms, as was the case in the Arab countries before the onset of the Arab Spring and with some of the newly emerging powers (the so-called BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China — and South Africa). Finally, we observe pension reforms with an emphasis on poverty reduction and social inclusion in such different contexts as Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, the latter being a country that had spearheaded the private pension model and is now looking for ways to strengthen the social functions of its old-age system.