Italian Pension Reform

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The Italian government finally agreed the details of the new penison reform yesterday. Curiously, it does not need to go to parliament for approval. Getting government agreement had not been without difficulty, and again interestingly enough it won’t come into effect for two years, giving next year’s incoming government plenty of time to change its mind.

The reform aims to launch a second pillar of private and occupational schemes to flank state pensions, using money which companies currently hold on behalf of their workers in a fund which employees receive when they leave their job. It will come into force at the same time as a reform of the state pension system which raises the retirement age to 60 from 57. Both measures could be changed or scrapped between now and 2008 by whoever wins the 2006 general election.

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About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".