The New Pension Mix in Europe. Inequality and Two Further Risks

This concluding chapter aims to provide a summary of reforms in Europe in the wake of the Great Recession, along with some insights concerning the main present and future risks for the pension mix in Europe. It thereby addresses the three main questions at the core of the book: what are the key traits of 21st century pension systems across Europe?; how sustainable are the reformed systems?; and, are social partners and trade unions seeing a decline in their role in pension politics? As regards the reforms passed in the recent years, the chapters above have shown that, especially in the countries most hit by the crisis, pension systems have seen the emergence of “new” traits. While cost-containment is often the key trait of the reform record, three main novelties should be stressed: the increase of pensionable age has become a key measure to improve the financial viability of pensions, while increasing benefits (at least for those with a long career); cutbacks have been implemented with short phase-in periods (if any) and through automatic mechanisms to link key parameters (e.g. pensionable age, indexation) to increasing life expectancy; and supplementary pension funds have been at the core of the reform effort, and some of those countries that set up a multi-pillar pension system in the 1990s have reverted to the mono-pillar system.