Reassessing South-European pensions: Evidence from two decades of reform

In the last years pension policy in Southern Europe has been largely reformed. Innovations have consisted in cost-containment and in some respects in the more ambitious attempt to recalibrate old-age protection. Taking stock of twenty years of legislative innovation in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, the paper shed light on the key traits of the reforms and their major institutional and distributional consequences.  The authors provide a summary of the reforms with a focus on the quantity of protection provided by the systems (cost-containment and/or expansionist measures) and its distribution across social groups (with a specific reference to the potential generational cleavage). The re-articulation of the public/private pension mix (the interplay between first pillar and supplementary schemes) is also assessed.

The comparative analysis allows for addressing the following crucial question: after two decades of reforms, do these systems still belong to a coherent pension and welfare model? Do these countries show much variation in their reform records? Or, at the opposite they still share some key institutional characteristics? Assessing the degree of divergence between the four pension systems, the paper advances and tests some hypothesis to understand the reform record of the four southern European countries under scrutiny.