From Austerity to Austerity. Pension reforms in Bulgaria and Romania

CPS Junior Research Fellow Dragos Adascalitei gave a presentation at the Centre for Doctoral Studies at the University of Mannheim on pension reforms in Romania and Bulgaria.

The presentation was given as part of the Doctoral Colloquium at the Center for Doctoral Studies in Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Mannheim.

The presentation focused on the transformation of the public pension systems of the two latecomers to the EU camp, Romania and Bulgaria. The two countries started the transition with similar public PAYG public pension systems. However, by the time the financial crisis of the late 2000’s hit their economies, their old age systems diverged in several important aspects including benefit adequacy, the scale of the fiscal deficits associated with old age expenditures as well as the timing and size of the private pillar. It argued that the divergence is unrelated with strategic choices undertaken by governments or variation in institutional capacity of the two countries. Instead, it is a consequence of the temporary political coalitions that emerged during key moments of reform in combination with a series of piecemeal decisions contingent on contextual events.

Presentation (Download)