PENSION REFORM IN THE EUROPEAN PERIPHERY: THE ROLE OF EU REFORM ADVOCACY

Paul D. Collins, Andrew Podger, Keyong Dong, Matthias Stepan and Karen M. Anderson

Public Administration & Development, 2014, vol. 34, issue 4, 320-331

Abstract: SUMMARY This paper analyzes the impact of international reform advocacy on national pension reforms. We analyze European Union (EU) reform advocacy in two EU member states: Greece and Hungary. Although the EU has articulated a fairly coherent template for sustainable pensions, its use of soft coordination to influence national reforms has repeatedly collided with resistance to reform in the member states. As a result, EU soft law initiatives have had limited impact on pension reforms. In contrast, the sovereign debt crisis that began in 2009 provided a new push for EU reform advocacy because it gave the “troika” (the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) substantial influence on pension reform in two countries affected by the debt crisis: Greece and Hungary. Analysis of the two countries' pension reform trajectories allows us first to determine to what extent Greek and Hungarian pension reforms conform to the EU's reform template and, second, how the troika conditionality has a causal impact on the content of reforms in both countries. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:padxxx:v:34:y:2014:i:4:p:320-331

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Public Administration & Development from Blackwell Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().