The Rise and Fall of the Privatized Pension System in Chile: An International Perspective

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 Chile's 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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments; 1 Introduction; 2 An Overview of Social Security: Purposes, Modalities and Historical Evolution; 3 The Rise and Fall of Pension Privatization in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe; The Evolution of Social Protection and Pension Systems in Chile from the 19th Century until Its Privatization in the 1980s; Empirical Elements for Evaluating the Privatized Chilean Pension System; 6 Synthesis and Conclusions: Reform Paralysis and the Road to De-privatization; References; Index.

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

Review :
“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.