This paper surveys the most significant problems of the pension systems of EU11 countries. These nations had to transform their old-age social security systems after replacing a state-socialist economic order with a capitalist one. Stressing common as well as specific features, our paper...

This paper discusses design errors in public pension systems, using Hungary as an illus-tration. When the communist political and economic system was replaced by democracy and market economy, the subsequent governments had even greater difficulties in designing consistent pension reforms than...

The dependence of benefit on the retirement age (the schedule) is an important feature in any public pension system. The nonfinancial defined contribution (NDC) pension system has recently become popular mainly because of its allegedly actuarial fairness. Using the framework of mechanism design...

In this paper, we analyze Hungarian pension policies between 1998 and 2017, comparing the pre- and post-2010 periods. Before 2010, Hungary was a liberal democracy dominated by populist economic policies. We call this the period of democratic populism. After 2010, with center-right but illiberal...

We reconsider the problem of indexation of public pensions, emphasizing that similar contribution paths should imply similar benefit paths. This robustness criterion is only satisfied by full wage indexing, which in turn requires the politically unpopular reduction of the accrual rates. To...

In 2011, the Hungarian government introduced seniority pensions (Female40): females, who have been accumulating at least 40 years of eligibility (related to the length of contributions), can retire at any age without actuarial benefit reduction. The elimination of other early retirement scheme...