Reforming against all odds: Multi‐pillar pension systems in the Czech Republic and Romania

Attempts to replace pay‐as‐you‐go pension schemes with private funded systems came to a halt in Central and Eastern Europe after 2005. However, more recently, the region has witnessed two belated reformers: the Czech Republic and Romania. Both countries decided to partially privatize pensions despite the rising tide of evidence concerning the challenges associated with the policy. We argue that while part of the domestic political elite remained supportive of private funded pensions, the difficulties experienced by earlier reformers and reduced support from International Financial Institutions led to the adoption of small funded pension pillars. Such cautious attempts at privatization might become more common in the future as large reforms have proven politically unsustainable.     

From Austerity to Austerity: The Political Economy of Public Pension Reforms in Romania and Bulgaria

This article discusses the trajectories of pension system reforms in two of the latecomers to the EU: Bulgaria and Romania. It finds that over the past two decades, the two countries pursued increasingly dissimilar public pension reforms for managing their respective public pay‐as‐you‐go pension systems. Using a political institutionalist theoretical framework, I argue that the divergence between the two cases is attributable to multiple factors. First, different temporary political compromises between national and international actors generated reforms that retrenched public pensions and introduced mandatory private accounts. Second, pension reforms often had unintended consequences that limited their intended impact. Third, incremental adjustments introduced by governments in response to political pressures caused alternating phases of austerity and generosity that catered to different constituencies in each country. In Romania, reform outcomes amounted to a moderately generous pension system, financed through relatively high contribution rates with a small funded component, while in the case of Bulgaria, the pension system evolved into a meagre programme, financed through low contribution rates and a larger private pillar.     

Institutional and Stakeholder Mapping: Frameworks for Policy Analysis and Institutional Change

Despite its importance and its widespread employment in policymaking practice, the theoretical and epistemic foundations of institutional mapping have not been elaborated and its legitimacy is yet to be fully granted by the academic community. This paper is a contribution to this overdue effort. The paper has two parts. First it introduces mapping as a cognitive process and explore in this context the structural similarities between maps and theories. While doing that it identifies the basic elements of mapping as a cognitive procedure and based on that it outlines the optimal features of the possible meta-theories framing policy-oriented institutional mapping. The second part goes a step further and discusses two concrete examples that may come close to illustrate the meta-theoretical ideal-type outlined at the end of the first part: the theoretical system implied in the Chicago School of sociology and the Institutional Analysis and Development framework inspired by the new institutional economics.