South-European pensions through the crisis: Sheddling light on reforms' dynamics, output, and outcomes

Southern European pensions have been under extreme pressure in the last decades: growing public budget stress, population ageing, uneven (sometime overly-generous, sometimes insufficient) protection have led to much policy reform.  Such a long-term trend has been followed by further policy changes in the wake of the crisis. The paper sheds light on the reform record of four countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain) looking at the main dynamics through which new measures have been debated and eventually approved. We focus in particular on the role of the EU and other international organisations involved in the process (the so-called exogenous constraint). We then look at the reform output and outcomes. As for the output, we assess the role of public and supplementary private schemes (looking at the new public/private pension mix). As for the outcomes, we analyse the main distributional effects of the reforms. The authors provide a summary of the reforms with a focus on the policy trend (towards cost-containment and/or expansionist measures) and its distributional consequences across social groups (with a specific reference to the potential generational and the insider/outsider cleavage). The comparative analysis allows for tracing the long-term trend of pension protection in the four countries under scrutiny, and summarizing the main traits of the reformed south European pension model(s) in the broader European context.