CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

This piece of research shows that the models of stratification underpinning social policy may not only differ across countries, as comparative analyses have shown. They can also change historically, in a given country, in spite of the institutional constraints and path dependencies involved. The nature of policy change and the trajectories of social policy in any given national setting could be thus broadly conceived as indicating changes in the ideas, priorities, and methods of social policymaking. In distributional terms, there has not been a single pension regime over Argentine history. Instead, alternative models have been applied over time to realize different policy priorities. These dynamics are essential to an evaluation of policy change, not only with regards to distributional principles, but also to the actual distributional impacts of pension policy within and between generations. The outcomes of pension institutions are also not simply dependent on the pension rules applicable at a given moment in time (for example, at retirement age). Instead, they depend, for each generation of workers, on the evolution of rules over their whole lives (working and retirement periods), as well as on the specific mechanism by which these rules were implemented, and the context of implementation. In countries such as Argentina, where institutions are less resilient to political and economic change, the impacts of subsequent reforms on different generations of workers have been substantial. This piece of research contributes to unveiling some key changes in the distributional principles and outcomes of pension policy from a historical viewpoint?an area where empirical research remained rather limited in spite of the substantial reform processes that have taken place in Argentina?and their importance for policy learning in countries pursuing similar reform paths.

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