ارزیابی تعادل عمومی از پایداری از اصلاحات جدید بازنشستگی در ایتالیا

Most European countries have recently introduced pension system reforms to face the financial problem related to population ageing. Italy is not an exception. The reforms introduced during the Nineties (Amato Reform in 1992 and Dini Reform in 1995), even if they will produce a strong reduction in pension benefits, are generally considered not sufficient to adequately face the population ageing problem. For this reason, in 2004, the Berlusconi government introduced a new reform that increases the retirement age to 60 years from January 2008 onwards, to 61 years from 2010 and to 62 from 2014. In 2007, the left-wing government replaced this reform with a softer one that fixes the minimum retirement age at 58 from 2008. Using an applied overlapping-generations general equilibrium model with endogenous growth due to human capital accumulation, we analyse the impact of the new reforms on the macroeconomic system and in particular on the long-run sustainability of the pension system. We show that the increase in the retirement age would permit to reduce pension deficits in the short and medium run, while in the long run these reforms would become completely ineffective.

Industrialised countries will know a phase of significant demographic changes over the next 50 years. The increase in life expectancy, the reduction of fertility rates and, most of all, the baby-boom produced during the Fifties and Sixties have induced a population ageing that will put the financing of the social security systems under considerable stress. Italian demographics are quite representative of this largely European phenomenon. The demographic projections based on the central hypothesis presented by Istat (2006) show that the working age population–the number of people between 20 and 64–will drop by 23% between 2000 and 2050 (Fig. 1) and the old-age dependency ratio–the ratio of the number of people aged 65 and more to the working age population–will increase from 28.9% in 2000 to 68.1% in 2050 (Fig. 2). Full-size image (29 K) Fig. 1. Working age population. Istat (2006). Figure options Full-size image (32 K) Fig. 2. Old-age dependency ratio. Istat (2006). Figure options To face this problem, most European countries have recently introduced pension system reforms. Even if European pension systems remain essentially different, some similar measures have been introduced in order to reduce the pension expenditure burden: the indexation of pension benefits to prices, the increase in the retirement age and the increase of the role of private funding. However, the Pay-As-You-Go system is still largely the most important pillar of European pension systems. During the Nineties, two reforms of the pension system were implemented in Italy, the Amato reform (1992), and the Dini reform (1995). Even if these reforms would induce a significant reduction in future pension benefits, they are unanimously regarded as being non-sufficient in the medium run–because of the long transition phase imposed by the Dini reform that will produce important social security deficits–as well as in the long run: even when completely applied, the reforms cannot be expected to achieve the financial equilibrium of the pension system.1 In addition, the impacts on the macroeconomic system are likely to be negative: as shown by Magnani (2006), pension system deficits generate a fall in national savings, reduce capital accumulation and slow down economic growth. As a consequence, a new pension system reform seemed inevitable and in 2004, the Berlusconi government decided to increase the minimum retirement age to 60 from January 2008 onwards. The Berlusconi reform, even if it would produce a significant reduction of the pension expenditures in the short term, has been considered deeply unfair with respect to the generations born after 1948. For this reason, and given the pressure exerted by Italian’s trade unions, the left-wing Prodi government replaced in 2007 the Berlusconi reform with a softer one: the minimum retirement age is fixed at 58 from January 2008 and will gradually increase over time up to 62. The aim of this paper is to evaluate and compare the Berlusconi and the Prodi reforms. We evaluate the effects on the pension system and on the macroeconomy of the increase in the retirement age proposed by the new reforms. We show that the Prodi reform induces an important reduction in pension deficits in the medium run, but less important than the reduction that could be induced by the Berlusconi reform. However, these two new reforms become completely ineffective in the long run. Our assessment is based on simulation exercises using an applied overlapping-generations general equilibrium model. A dynamic general equilibrium perspective is indeed required in order to evaluate the effects of pension reforms on the macroeconomy and on the pension system, since population ageing will significantly affect labour supply (and thus the evolution of wages) and capital accumulation (and thus the evolution of investments, interest rates and GDP). The evolution of wages directly affects the evolution of social security contributions, whereas the evolution of GDP growth rates, with the application of the Dini reform, affects the evolution of pension benefits. The model used in this paper is of the type pioneered by Auerbach and Kotlikoff (1987), though with significant differences: we introduce mortality, immigration, human capital accumulation, and endogenous growth. The introduction of mortality and immigration makes it possible to accurately reproduce the demographic projections and to simulate the effects of changes in immigration flows. The introduction of human capital makes it possible to introduce a mechanism of endogenous growth based on the average level of knowledge present in the economy à la Lucas (1988). Human capital accumulation results from explicit decisions made by young people to invest time in education. An important aspect related to population ageing is the effects of demographic change and pension reforms on education decisions and consequently on economic growth.2 Indeed, relative factor prices are likely to vary significantly in the next decades hence affecting the decision to invest or not in human capital. One can expect that the impact of population ageing on human capital formation will be positive, since ageing would boost wages and reduce interest rates, and that the increase in retirement age would encourage individuals to devote more time to schooling. The positive impact on economic growth could be important3 and, as a consequence, produce positive effects on the financial situation of the pension system. Our model treats Italy as a closed economy. The degree of the financial openness is a very important aspect (see Börsh-Supan et al., 2006 and Agliettaet al., 2007, and Chateau et al. (2008)) since it affects the determination of the interest rate that influences the evolution of the public debt, the evolution of capital accumulation, the economic growth, and so on. The choice to not consider Italy as an open economy is related to the fact that all developed countries are faced (even with different degrees) to an important ageing phenomenon that will deeply affect the world interest rate. So, we think that an open economy scenario, which implies that the interest rate is fixed at a constant world level, is not a plausible assumption in our ageing context. The paper is organised as follows: in the next section, we describe the characteristics of the Italian pension system and the reforms recently introduced. In Sections 3 and 4, we describe the structure of the OLG model and its calibration. Section 5 presents the simulation results concerning the Berlusconi and the Prodi reforms. Section 6 presents some sensitivity analysis concerning the immigration and the value of pension benefits. We draw our conclusions in the last section.

The reforms introduced during the Nineties (the Amato reform in 1992 and the Dini reform in 1995) imply a strong penalisation for people who pay low amounts of contributions (in particular people who retire at 57 and self-employed workers). However, these reforms fail to ensure long run solvability of the Italian pension system and, during the transition phase, the pension system would produce deficits as high as 3%–5% of GDP. For this reason, in 2004, the Berlusconi government introduced a reform that increases the minimum retirement age to 60 years after 2008. In 2007, the Prodi government replaced the previous reform by a softer one implying that the minimum retirement age is fixed at 58 from 2008 and will gradually increase over time up to 62. The objective of this paper is to provide an evaluation of the impacts of these reforms by using an applied overlapping-generations general equilibrium model. We show that the increase in the retirement age will induce a significant improvement of the financial conditions of the pension system, but only in the short and in the medium run. After 2040, the positive effect related to the increase in the labour supply, and then in contributions paid by the workers, is compensated by the increase in the value of pension benefits perceived by people forced to postpone retirement. The increase in the retirement age has no positive impact on the financial conditions of the pension system from 2045 onwards, and the pension deficit remains at about 1.7% of GDP in 2055. From the point of view of equity among generations, the generational accounting approach shows that, with respect to the base scenario, the increase in the retirement age will cause an important loss for the generations forced to work more, especially for the generations born in the periods 1946–1950 and 1951–1955 who receive pension benefits computed with the earning based method. We have also shown the sensitivity of our results to the hypothesis concerning immigration. In particular, we analysed a scenario in which also the second-generation immigrants displays fertility rates higher then those of natives, and a scenario in which the government introduces an ambitious immigration policy. In both cases, immigration permits to reduce the old-age dependency ratio and can be considered as an instrument that can be used to guarantee the long-term solvability of the pension system. Finally, we analysed an important aspect of the Dini reform (1995). The transformation coefficients used in the computation of the pension benefits with the pro-rata method and the contribution based method are supposed to be updated every ten years according to the evolution of several elements, especially the increase in life expectancy. In 2005, i.e. when the first revision would have been made and close to national elections, nothing happened. In 2007, the Prodi government proposed new transformation coefficients, but (i) at the same time, the Prodi reform appointed a commission that will propose before December 2008 new criteria for the determination of the transformation coefficients (ii) the transformation coefficients will be applied starting from 2015, i.e. with the pro-rata method. This suggests that the new transformation coefficients are likely to be modified before 2015. In any case, we have shown that the transformation coefficients proposed with the Prodi reform would permit an important reduction in pension deficits. Moreover, even if this implies important income losses for the retirees, a generational accounting analysis shows that the future generations will not be penalised, since the loss in pension benefits will be compensated by a lower taxation.