State Pension Fund Reform Project

Under the title “State Pension Fund Reform Project: Benefits and Limits of a Cross-Country Evaluation,” our institute hereby presents the findings of a recently completed study. Against the backdrop of public discussions concerning the pension reform plans of the current German government, which refer to the establishment of state funds in European neighboring countries to supplement traditional social state pension schemes, our research aimed to determine, through a systematic comparative approach, under which specific societal conditions and based on which specific institutional arrangements such reforms were initiated elsewhere and to what extent they met the expectations placed on them.

Starting with a systematic collection, analysis, and critical evaluation of the relevant scientific research in this area, a comparison panel of six European countries was constituted according to a proven ideal-typical classification of different welfare regimes, including Germany, Sweden, Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, and Switzerland in the country comparison.

The findings presented here are based, on one hand, on the evaluation of available specialized literature, particularly the latest thematically relevant social statistical data published by various international organizations, and on the other hand, on extensive expert interviews with specialists from the respective national contexts, who could contribute their expertise to complement the consulted written sources, either through their scientific publications or through their professional activity in the field of social security in their countries.

The results of our study illustrate that the experiences with pension reforms of this type in other countries are highly context-specific and dependent, and depending on the socio-historically developed institutional peculiarities of the pension security systems, as well as specific socio-demographic and economic parameters, cannot be easily transferred to another context.

The study, conducted on behalf of the German Institute for Retirement Provision (“Deutsches Institut für Altersvorsorge”, DIA), is available on the institute’s website (link). The results of the study have already been discussed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. (Article behind a paywall)

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