New paper: Chile's Next Generation Pension Reform

The most recent issue of the Social Security Bulletin includes a new article by Barbara Kritzer of SSA titled "Chile's Next Generation Pension Reform." This is important stuff given how influential Chile's personal accounts-based reforms have been throughout Latin America and as an inspiration for "privatization" in the U.S. Here's the abstract:

In 1981, Chile was the first country to replace its public pay-as-you-go pension system with mandatory individual retirement accounts. This system has become a model for pension reformers around the world. Although Chile's system has undergone many changes since its inception, a number of policy challenges remained, including worker coverage, pension adequacy, gender equity, and administrative fees. A March 2008 comprehensive pension reform law addressed many of these issues by adding a basic universal pension, requiring the self-employed to join the individual account system, encouraging greater competition among pension fund providers, lowering administrative fees, providing financial incentives for women to work longer, allowing widowers to receive a survivor pension, dividing individual account assets between spouses in case of divorce or marriage annulment, expanding voluntary pensions, setting up a new administrative structure, and launching a new financial education program.

Click here to read the whole paper.