The Rise and Fall of the Privatized Pension System in Chile focuses on the Chilean experience with a privatised pension system since the early 1980 when launched by the Pinochet regime. It explores economic, financial and political economy dimensions of a private pension system based on individual savings capacity implemented in a highly unequal country. The book also highlights the role played by the pension system as a mechanism of savings redistribution from wage earners and the self-employed to the funding of big corporations at home and abroad, in a process intermediated by profit-making pension fund management companies. The book compares the resilience of Chiles private pension system with the reversals of the privatised pension system in recent years in countries of Latin America and Central-Eastern Europe. It outlines a program of structural pension reform towards a more progressive, public-based system.
The Rise and Fall of the Privatized Pension System in Chile presents the rationale for the existence of social security systems and provides a historical discussion of its origins and evolution before turning to the four-decade-old Chilean experience with a privatised pension system. This experience is examined in historical and comparative perspective from the twentieth century up to the present.
The book presents various hypotheses on the resilience of the privatised system in spite of the low level of pensions delivered to the population at large, underscoring the ability of the powerful fund managing companies lobby to veto reform proposals geared towards a return to a public-private system. The book also underscores the fiscal costs of the system, the high earnings of private pension managing companies and the macroeconomic role of the system in providing financial resources for investment and growth in a pattern driven by the large corporate sector.
The book discusses the experience of Chile as a counter-current to the reversal of pension privatisation in Latin America and Central-Eastern Europe as also the scope for de-privatisation of social security in the country.
The Rise and Fall of the Privatized Pension System in Chile analyses the Chilean experience with a privatised pension system and examines its impact on pension levels for the ageing population, differences in benefits across different groups, impact on local capital markets, savings redistribution to big corporations and foreign countries, and high profit rates for pension fund managing companies.
