The politics of pension policy responses to COVID-19: comparative insights from Chile, Bolivia and Peru

Leandro Carrera and Marina Angelaki

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a debate around the world on whether pension systems should be used to support individuals in economic distress. In Latin America, Chile, Bolivia and Peru have passed legislation allowing withdrawals from pension pots, yet with some significant variation. We argue that these measures cannot be simply understood because of the COVID-19 emergency alone but should also take into consideration the combination of legacies from previous pension re-reforms and the political institutional setting. We find that where previous re-reforms have been difficult to implement or have not been implemented at all and the institutional setting makes change difficult, measures that lead to a significant amount of savings being withdrawn may be favoured by political actors as a way to break the stalemate. By contrast, where re-reforms have been largely implemented and the political institutional setting poses few barriers to change, withdrawals may be more limited.

Keywords: institutions; policy legacies; pensions; Latin America; Covid-19; coronavirus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2022-11-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-lam
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Published in Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy, 10, November, 2022, 38(3), pp. 208 - 222. ISSN: 2169-9763

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