The Rise and Fall of the Privatized Pension System in Chile - by Andrés Solimano (Paperback)

About the Book

'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.

Book Synopsis

'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.

Review Quotes

"Using his deep knowledge of Chile and of economics, Andres Solimano has provided a careful and highly informed analysis of that system and of its shortcomings, a system that became increasingly unfair with the passage of time. This is a must read for anyone interested in pension reforms." -- Vito Tanzi, Former Director of the Department of Fiscal Affairs, IMF

In this book, some historical developments of the Chilean pension program can be found, starting from the decades before the privatization of the pension system in the 1980s and the period afterward up to the calls for the de-privatization of pension funds. This is a story that obviously needs to be told as the risks of selling the Chilean model as a solution to collapsing economies remain in Latin America where authorities are still tempted to privatize public services -- Luciano Bottini Filho Lecturer, Sheffield Hallam University and Ph.D. candidate, University of Bristol; Journal of Social Security Law; 2022, 29(2), 155-156.

About the Author

Andrés Solimano holds a PhD in economics from MIT and is founder and president of the International Center for Globalisation and Development.