Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a published version is known of, the repository item page linked to above, will contain details on accessing it.

This paper compares how extensions of pension rights were developed and implemented in major European economies in the decades following the Second World War. Governments in Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain adapted earnings-related systems as a common policy agenda to meet rising public demand for more generous pension provision. However, this generated divergent policy pathways as a common approach became translated through different institutional mechanisms and different conventions of governance - the points at which states could legitimately intervene to secure policy goals. In consequence, divisions between public and private pension provision (and the boundaries of welfare states) were blurred by the emergence of institutional hybrids. Neither state nor market, these developed in continental Europe as negotiated compromises that fostered social representation in the management of collective provision under various forms. By contrast, in the UK such governing conventions were absent and, hence, the division between public and private has proved more deep-rooted. Historical precedent suggests that current pressures towards private pension solutions cannot but produce another compromise in the form of a public-private hybrid to reconcile financial imperatives with popular demands for pension security.

A liberal paradigm shift from state to private responsibility in old age income protection has been a general development across Western Europe. The financial crisis sheds new light on the question of the public-private divide in pension policy. Applying convention theory, the analysis reviews how funded pensions are governed and how states use a range of regulation to control their operations as they seek to convert market-related practices to social policy purposes. The article argues that accruing state regulation consequent on coping with the financial crisis and its aftermath has undermined easy distinctions between public and private schemes, and is generating increasingly technocratic and oligarchic forms of pension governance, to the detriment of democratic debate on pensions.

As unemployment has risen, so has academic, professional and political interest in its possible social consequences. In recent years a large number of studies have sought to prove-or disprove-that unemployment causes ill health, with few definitive results. This paper reviews the methodological and conceptual difficulties experienced by researchers in this field. It concludes that, generally, the impact of structural factors on the shape of the analysis has been all but ignored. It suggests that an historical perspective provides useful insights into the question and ought to be given more attention.

No abstract