Social Security systems in Latin America prior to the reforms exhibited some problems that have been reported also in other parts of the world, including OECD countries. This is the case for instance of the increasing pressure that the pension system put on fiscal accounts. Other problems that...

Incomplete and highly fragmented work histories threaten to leave many contributors of the pension schemes in Latin America without the minimum pension guarantee or even without access to the ordinary pension. We propose a methodology to assess this risk, identify vulnerable groups and study...

The aim of this paper is to present the macroeconomic model used to simulate the part of the Uruguayan pension system covered by the Banco de Previsión Social.The model in this paper is a variant of the overlapping generation models that have been extensively used to study fiscal policy in...

This paper summarizes our simulations of the fiscal effects of the recent reform of the Uruguayan pension system for the 1996-2050 period. According to our results, fiscal effects of the reform crucially depend on what happens with the retirement age and with evasion in the new regime. We get...

Excess distortions in the welfare state might be the consequence of the government's lack of ability to commit not to help "unlucky" agents. Incentive considerations that are crucial in standard insurance in the presence of moral hazard, plays no role in this case. As a consequence, the...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic impacts of the reform of public services in Uruguay. A computable general equilibrium (CGE) model is used to simulate different policy scenarios, analyzing the reforms of the regulatory framework of public services, changes in their investment policies,...

The reform of the Uruguayan social security system approved in 1995 might raise national savings in the median and long run, if it induces increases in mean retirement ages or causes a substantial reduction of evasion. Otherwise, the reform might cause a reduction of national savings....

This paper analyzes the structural reform process that has been taking place in Uruguay since the return to democracy in 1985. Three main questions oriented the research: why reform? what kind of reform? and, how well did the reform perform? The main focus is on the pro-market reforms as they...

Most public pension systems failed to build trust funds, even when it was clear that they were becoming unsustainable in the long run. It is argued in this paper that politicians ruling public pension programs have strong incentives to exhaust the trust funds, distributing benefits among voters...

The Uruguayan pension system is one of the largest in Latin America relative to the country size. In 1995, the parliament passed a new pension law that introduced structural reforms in the system. The key goal of the reform was to restore intertemporal sustainability of the public budget, that...