Ageing and the politics of pension reforms in Central Europe, South‐Eastern Europe and the Baltic States

Abstract

This article investigates ageing and the politics of pension reforms in Central Europe, South-Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. It emphasises the importance of historical legacies, presence of veto points, trade unions' power, electoral rules and country-specific patterns of political competition, but it also highlights the central role in institutional change played by other concomitant factors, such as those associated with the communicative actions of national and international actors. The role played by power politics, class conflicts and strategic use of social policies is also emphasised. The main argument put forward in this article is that pressures for reforms in the pension systems have not only been the response of demographic, economic and financial pressures but have also been the result of a new consensus found on new economic ideas and discourses that saw in the privatisation of the economy a new modernisation paradigm.

Mandatory Pension System and Redistribution: The Comparative Analysis of Institutions in Baltic States

“…The configuration of contemporary mandatory pension system in the Baltic States was heavily influenced by the legacy of Soviet Union (Lazutka, 2007). The elements of Bismarckian social insurance were established in the Baltic States before the occupation of Soviet Union -in Estonia 1906and 1924, Latvia 1922and Lithuania 1922(Cerami, 2011. However, after the Soviet Occupation, the institutions of social insurance system were expanded.…”

“…In spite of the fact that Baltic States started from an identical institutional legacy (Norkus, 2012), there was some variation in the construction of pensions system (Müller, 2002). However, the contemporary pension systems are quite the same in the Baltic States (Aidukaitė, 2006;Cerami, 2011;Orenstein, 2013). The elements of public pension, personal pension and voluntary insurance are in all Baltic States.…”

“…Also Estonia and Latvia lead by the overall number of attributes that allow persons to take early retirement. The existence of special cases shows the legacy of Soviet Union (Müller, 2002;Cerami, 2011).…”

Promoting a higher retirement age: A prospect‐theoretical approach

“…The Czech, Polish and Slovak data lend themselves to a study of the relationship between the institutional set‐up of the national pension system and welfare preferences. The three countries share the common heritage of the Bismarckian welfare state founded by the Austro‐Hungarian Empire, as well as a state‐socialist past followed by a post‐1989 transition (Cerami, ; Myant & Drahokoupil, ). As can be seen in Table , the broader macroeconomic environment, as well as the recent experience with rising longevity, in the three countries is very similar.…”

Pension reform in the Czech Republic after 2010

“…This ratio is constantly deteriorating; in 2050 it will be down to approximately 1.2 unless the parameters of the system change (Cerami 2011). It would be honest to tell citizens that in the future the solidarity-based state pension system will not provide them with relative pensions similar to those that their parents had.…”