Clientelism in Social Security

Alvaro Forteza ()

No 1500, Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Department of Economics - dECON

Abstract: Most public pension systems failed to build trust funds, even when it was clear that they were becoming unsustainable in the long run. It is argued in this paper that politicians ruling public pension programs have strong incentives to exhaust the trust funds, distributing benefits among voters to raise their probability of winning elections. Old citizens are among the most responsive voters to pensionary benefits and are thus the likely beneficiaries in this redistributive game. Within each generation, poor voters are more responsive to pensionary benefits than rich voters, and are therefore good targets for redistributive politics as well. Simulation results suggest that these policies may significantly dampen aggregate savings.

Keywords: Electoral Competition; Pensions; Political Clients; Probabilistic Voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E69 H55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2000-12
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ude:wpaper:1500

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