Building pension rights over the lifecycle. Working histories and pension reform in Italy and the UK

ARZA, CAMILA

Bremen (Alemania)

Conferencia; ESPANET Annual Conference; 2006

ESPANET

Over the past few decades, most European countries have undergone some kind of reform to guarantee the financial sustainability of their pension systems. In countries with Bismarckian as well as Beveridgean roots, across ?worlds of welfare? and ?families of nations?, recent experience suggests that pension schemes have been reshaped into ?individualised? arrangements, in which each individual?s ?biography? becomes key to determine the value of future pension benefits. Pension reform gave greater importance to private defined-contribution arrangements and/or reorganised existing public pensions tightening the link between individual contributions and benefits. Benefits increasingly depend on the ?present value? of contributions made over the working life by each individual, and therefore on the nature of his or her working-life history (years of work, type of contract, years outside the labour market, and wage level). This paper argues that a new conceptual and methodological framework is required to evaluate the distributional impacts of pension reform in the context of both changing institutional design and changing labour markets. It provides new empirical evidence on the impacts of pension reform in Europe and estimates the incidence of working patterns on future benefit adequacy and the prospective intra-generational distribution of benefits.