Political Economy of Pension Reform: Lessons for Pension Reform in Iran

Increases in life expectancy and reductions in fertility rate in last decades have lead to population aging in many countries worldwide. Accordingly, in many developed and developing countries pension schemes have faced with too much difficulty in financing their pension liabilities. In response to this difficulty that is called “Pension Crisis”, many of them started to reform their pension schemes, either structurally or only parametrically. Similar to any other kind of reform, pension reform has its own political economy too. Political economy of pension reform explores to recognize major players in the process of reform and investigates how their interests’ affect both speed and nature of the reform. In practice, pension reform look likes a redistribution policy that transfers resources between different groups. Knowing about political economy of pension reform would help policymakers to understand the reform process better for designing a more implementable reform.