La sostenibilidad económica y reforma de la pensión de jubilación en Italia y Españaanálisis comparado

Abstract

In the political discussion of recent decades, both nationally and internationally, until then focused on growth and globalization, attention has shifted to intergenerational solidarity; in this sense, retirement systems represent the area that has shown the most serious gaps in terms of sustainability and that has the greatest intergenerational effects. On the basis of European Community legislation and stressing the importance of the role of consultation at European level, the main obstacles, demographic, economic and employment, which stand between the current situation and the aims indicated by European documents are analyzed: among them the ageing of the population, which is one of the evolutionary processes, largely irreversible that forces a reinterpretation of the concept of old age. The lengthening of working life is an objective pursued with policies that advance entry into the world of work and, instead of forced mechanisms, through active aging, which would lead to older workers who are more motivated and more easily willing to continue their work. The equity mechanisms that have been introduced in recent decades in the legal body of Spain and Italy in order to pursue sustainability objectives have been shown to be substantially interpreted as a tool to limit pension benefits masked with a mathematical algorithm, difficult to perceive by the community. On the other hand, other instruments, such as the Spanish Social Security Reserve Fund, have proved to be more effective: the possibility of drawing on this reserve has in the past determined a very important element of stability. This is confirmed by what seems to be the policy undertaken in terms of sustainability by the Spanish regulatory system: with the MEI we have returned to more traditional methods, such as the contractual contribution of the Reserve Fund that shows how a community accepts a sacrifice easier to understand that returns the centrality to the contractual and political dynamics in its role of safeguarding the system. On the other hand, the Italian system has only one effective sustainability tool: the calculation of the pension on a notional basis. Despite a certain guarantee of stability even at increasing rates of ageing of the population, after a very long transitional period, it is evident that the main effect of the reform is the reduction in monetary terms of the retirement benefit and the decrease in the replacement rate. There is no doubt that the answer is linked to the existence of an effective method of detecting the factual situation, and not only of a purely numerical nature. Apart from the many indices that have been presented in this work, useful in identifying several aspects of different nature, it should be noted how the actuarial technical balance is an instrument that allows, thanks to the technological tools available today, to make long projections of the system platform and thus evaluate different development scenarios: This makes it the most appropriate instrument to know the state of a pension system, and study it in its most intrinsic evolutionary characteristics.