The evolution of pension systems in Argentina and in Italy: two Bismarkian regimes

BRAVO ALMONACID FLORENCIA; ANGELICA PURICELLI

Barcelona

Congreso; XXXVI International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association; 2018

LASA

Italy and Argentine exhibe an aged demographic structure in relation with their regional contexts. The increase of the elderly population has a significant impact in social security systems. Both countries pension system underwent considerably ruptures in the last decades. Although the challenges, the timing and the type of reforms that the two systems experimented may be differ, both they can be conceived as two Bismarkian regimes in crisis. As pension was basically considered as a postponed salary, it was clearly correlated to the amount of years worked, the type of job and the salary itself. However, as Argentina is characterized by a large amount of informal workers (although the percentage is not huge if compared with the Latin American region) also as a result of neoliberal policies and the dismantling of the industrial sector in the 1990s, the coverage was quite low. In Italy, on the contrary, the coverage has always been high. However, the fragmentation of the system, the segmentation of the market (and of the pension system itself) and the use of pension as a clientelistic tools brought to the formation of groups of insiders, with large and excessive provisional privileges, which are the cause of a disproportional growth of the expenditure to keep the system working. The two cases are analyzed within the theoretical framework offered by Esping-Andersen and its evolution offered by the new literature on Global South and Global North welfare regimes.