The Financial Crisis and Varieties of Pension Privatization Reversals in Eastern Europe

Since the global financial crisis, those East European countries that had partly privatized their pension systems in the 1990s or early 2000s increasingly scaled back their mandatory private retirement accounts and restored the role of public provision. What explains this wave of reversals in pension privatization and variation in its outcomes? Proponents of pension privatization had argued that it would boost domestic capital markets and economic growth. By revealing how pension privatization helped increase sovereign debt and how large a part of pension funds' assets was invested in government bonds, the crisis strengthened the position of domestic opponents of mandatory private accounts. But these actors' capacity and determination to reverse pension privatization depended on the level of their country's public debt and on pension funds' portfolio structure. Empirically, the argument is supported with case studies of Hungarian, Polish, and Slovak pension reform.     

Pension Privatization: Evolution of a Paradigm

From 1981 to 2004, a paradigm shift occurred in pension systems worldwide as more than 30 countries fully or partially replaced their state‐administered pay‐as‐you‐go pension systems with ones based on individual, private savings accounts. Yet in 2005, pension privatization abruptly stopped. After the 2008 crisis, several countries that had privatized their pension systems scaled back or even canceled individual accounts. Is the new pension paradigm dead? And if so, why? This article shows that fiscal and ideational factors caused a temporary halt to pension privatization worldwide and induced transnational pension policy networks to find new ways to respond to perceived failures. Adjustments to the new pension paradigm such as emphasizing minimum pensions and recommending that governments “nudge” rather than mandate pension savings will enable pension privatization to continue in years ahead, albeit in a revised form.     

Privatization in Central Europe: The Case of Housing Policy in Hungary

Policymakers in Central and Eastern Europe are encountering difficulties in resolving the clash between market efficiency and distributional equity. A similar tension characterized post-war Western Europe. However, in Central and Eastern Europe expectations emanating from the previous regime presume that distributional equity will compensate for the lack of market efficiency. The possible resolution of this tension is discussed in the context of the privatization in Hungary.     

Privatization and Regulatory Reform of Toll Motorways in Europe

This article analyzes current trends in toll motorway privatization in Europe as an illustration of the paradox of simultaneous deregulation/privatization and reregulation. Changes in the form of government intervention are identified as transitions from internal control on processes and inputs to external control on performance outputs. The state guarantees its capability to intervene and seek its own objectives even when giving up public property. In fact, output regulation is a partial substitute for public ownership. We analyze the hypothesis that privatization of motorways spurs price regulation. Indeed, we observe that toll regulation becomes more detailed as the private sector increases in size, which is a regular reaction across different institutional frameworks. This result is consistent with the literature on the rise of a regulatory state, which emerges with a new mode of governance based on indirect government. Moreover, the study provides evidence of the importance of temporal context in modeling public sector restructuring.     

The Politics of Network Governance in Europe: The Case of Energy Regulation

Networks are considered increasingly important for policy-making. The literature on new modes of governance in Europe suggests that their horizontal coordination capacity and flexible and informal structures are particularly suitable for governing the multilevel architecture of the European polity. However, empirical evidence about the effects of networks on policy-making and public policies is still quite limited. This article uses the case of the European network of energy regulators to explore the determinants of the position of network members and, in turn, the domestic adoption of soft rules developed within this network. The empirical analysis, based on multivariate statistics and semi-directive interviews, supports the expectation that institutional complementarities increase actors’ centrality in networks, while arguments based on organisational resources and age are disproved. Furthermore, results show that the overall level of adoption is considerable and that centrality might have a small positive effect on domestic adoption.     

Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance

The multifaceted challenges of contemporary governance demand a complex account of the ways in which those who are subject to laws and policies should participate in making them. This article develops a framework for understanding the range of institutional possibilities for public participation. Mechanisms of participation vary along three important dimensions: who participates, how participants communicate with one another and make decisions together, and how discussions are linked with policy or public action. These three dimensions constitute a space in which any particular mechanism of participation can be located. Different regions of this institutional design space are more and less suited to addressing important problems of democratic governance such as legitimacy, justice, and effective administration.     

中国企业年金基金治理研究

完善的企业年金基金治理结构和健全的企业年金基金治理机制是防范企业年金基金风险和保障计划受益人利益的关键。根据中国信托型企业年金计划管理模式的特点,科学合理地阐述了我国企业年金基金治理结构,并分析了包括内部控制、托管人委托限定、信息披露和中介机构监管在内的中国企业年金基金治理机制。     

Indirect Rule and Varieties of Governance

This article reexamines the venerable concept of indirect rule. We argue, drawing on evidence from colonial and postcolonial South Asia, that indirect rule actually represented a diverse set of governance forms that need to be clearly distinguished. Using a new typology of varieties of governance, we show that colonial governments established suzerain, hybrid, and de jure governance, in addition to direct rule across territories, based on the incentives and constraints of the state. The repertoire of governance forms narrowed and changed but did not disappear during decolonization, showing that the postcolonial state had powerful reasons to maintain forms of heterodox governance. Dramatic shifts, alongside enduring continuity, challenge a simple narrative of path dependence and the adherence to tradition, instead showing that governments have made conscious choices about how to govern. We conclude by discussing the implications of these arguments for broader understandings of state power.     

The Survival and Return of Institutions: Examples from Pension Reforms in Central,Eastern and South-eastern Europe

Opening a new phase in historical institutionalism, Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen show how a rigid dichotomy between incremental adaptation and radical transformation fails to capture important transformative processes common to advanced political economies. While their research focuses on gradual but radical transformation, the two authors leave open the interpretation of what constitutes abrupt, but only limited change. This article integrates their framework, defines what they call survival and return, and, within this genus, indicates two analytically distinct species: replication, where the old logic survives due to the redundancy of the new institutional arrangement; and reaction, where structural reforms generate demand for the old incentive structures, which are ultimately reintroduced. To elucidate the concepts, recent Croatian, Hungarian and Polish pension reforms are compared and their institutional instability analysed.     

Governance and innovation policy failures in Europe

It is axiomatic in business management that organization follows strategy. In public policy, it is not different: governance organization and tools are dependent on the objectives that authorities want to achieve. The present stagnation, if not decline, of the European Union provides an interesting warning not to ignore this. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

社会影响力债券模式下的养老服务合作治理

老龄化社会的迫近使我国养老社会服务供给面临巨大压力,倡导多元合作供给,创新理论、方法和实践已经成为解决我国老年社会服务问题的必由之路.在文献研究的基础上,创新性地利用社会影响力债券这一方兴未艾的社会治理工具,联结政府、市场和社会组织,使三方共存于同一个利益诉求整合、平等磋商协作的框架下,能够为我国社会养老服务的合作治理提供更高效的供给模式和更稳固的合作模式.以老年健康服务为例,基于社会影响力债券的运作理念,构建社会影响力债券的合作模式,关键是需要以政府、市场、社会组织与评估机构共同为主体;以实现提供高质量的养老健康服务、节省政府开支、提高资金效率为目标;以第三方评估和数字物联网技术实现过程涵盖式的结果控制.同时,坚持基于成功结果导向的付费机制,倡导互信,维护多元互益的合作机制.基于社会影响力债券的养老服务合作治理模式能为破解社会养老困局提供参考.     

Political Embeddedness of Public Pension Governance: An Event History Analysis of Discount Rate Changes

State governments are frequently said to manipulate the discount rate assumption to make pension funding look better, reduce employers' and employees' pension contributions, or relieve fiscal stress. Building a model from the political embeddedness perspective and applying an event history analysis to the 81 largest state‐administered pension plans in the United States, the authors found that more politically embedded pension boards were actually more likely to reduce their plan's discount rate. Public union coverage and government political ideology, however, had no significant impact on discount rate changes. These findings reveal the effect of political embeddedness on pension planning decisions and provide useful insights into the intricate process of setting pension discount rates in a new era of more muted investment return expectations. This article points to both political and financial pressures facing pension boards and state governments for many years to come.