The economic demands of an ageing population, coupled with the crisis of public spending pose one of the greatest challenges to social policy in both the East and West. This book focuses on the political economy of pensions, particularly on the interaction between private and state provision....

Previous researches have demonstrated that consumer decisions could be affected by some biases in the supplementary pension field. Decision-making is very often not guided by reason, and in many cases, if forced to choose, people will decide not to decide, passively accepting the decisions made...

In spite of the bleak outlook for Italian retirees' financial security in their foreseeable future, at the end of 2007, according to data supplied by the Supervisory Authority over Pension Funds, only about 19.8% of Italian workers joined a private pension scheme. More worryingly, young...

We use 6 waves of the Bank of Italy's Survey on household income and wealth (SHIW) to check the evolution of workers' expectations on future pension benefits and retirement age from 2000 to 2012. Based on these two subjective evaluations, we compute a measure of expected pension benefit and...