No Country for Old (Poor) Men: Fairness and Public Pensions
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929919887865 |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Early Results |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929919887865
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(1) 137 –147
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929919887865
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No Country for Old (Poor)
Men: Fairness and Public
Pensions
Vincenzo Alfano1
and Pietro Maffettone2
Abstract
Public pensions are a ‘social technology’ at the heart of most welfare states. The basic goal pursued
by a public pension system is to make sure that individuals do not outlive their savings. An increasing
number of states have recently moved to a system that matches individuals’ contributions over
their working lives to a specific stream of revenue during their retirement years (i.e. defining
contributions rather than benefits). As a result, intragenerational fairness concerns have started to
become more relevant. In this article, we shall claim that, irrespective of how one conceptualises
the welfare state, most public pension systems violate actuarial fairness and any plausible account
of distributive justice, and that they do so for structural reasons. Studying the Italian case, we offer
insights on this regressive redistributive effect, based on regional data, and offer an implicit policy
solution to obviate this problem.
Keywords
public pension system, welfare state, life expectancy
Accepted: 17 October 2019
Pensions and Fairness
Pensions are a ‘social technology’ (Ewald, 1986) at the heart of most welfare states.
The basic goal pursued by a public pension system (PPS) is to ensure that individuals
do not outlive their savings. Like any public economic institution, economic sustaina-
bility over time is a crucial problem. How will PPSs be funded? The answer has (often)
been for the state to guarantee an intergenerational contract between workers and retir-
ees, by imposing contributions on those in the labour market. This is the so-called ‘pay-
as-you-go’ (PAYG) system (see Howse, 2007). This kind of funding mechanism poses
questions of intergenerational fairness and sustainability, given recent demographic
trends in most Western countries.
1 ISMed University of Naples Federico II, Napoli, Italy & Istituto per il Mediterraneo – Consiglio Nazionale
delle Ricerche, Napoli, Italy
2Department of Political Sciences University of Naples Federico II, Napoli, Italy
Corresponding author:
Vincenzo Alfano, Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche, Via Mezzocannone 4, 80138 Napoli, Italy.
Email: vincenzo.alfano@unina.it
887865PSW0010.1177/1478929919887865Political Studies ReviewAlfano and Maffettone
research-article2020
Early Results
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