The development of public pensions from 1889 to the 1990s

ARZA, CAMILA; JOHNSON, PAUL

Oxford Handbook of Pensions and Retirement Income

Oxford University Press

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2006; p. 52 - 75

In 1889 Germany became the first country in the world to introduce a compulsory national public old age pension scheme. Over the following 100 years public pensions were adopted by almost every country as part of a global expansion of social security systems. The long run development of public pensions is, therefore, intimately linked with the twentieth-century extension of state activity into social and economic affairs, and thus with the political economy of state power. Political considerations have been an important influence on the evolution of public pension systems, and they are likely to remain a central determinant of the scope for public pension reform in the twenty-first century. This chapter begins with a brief review of the pattern of public pension development over the century from 1889, and follows this with a discussion of the reasons for expansion. The third section examines in some detail the variation between countries and over time in the structure and purpose of public pension systems showing that there is much more variety in aims and system designs than usually assumed. In a fourth section, the chapter presents some case-studies which illustrate both the incremental nature of system development, and the importance of the political context in which this development has taken place. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of historical legacy in setting the parameters within which current discussions of public pension reform take place.