Social Security: Pensions and Social Minima

Abstract

In Southern Europe, old age pensions are by far the largest single social security benefit. Throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s, a rapid increase in pension spending took place in all four countries. The driving forces for this change were the lack of proportionality between pensions and contributions, as well as the deteriorating ratio between pensioners and the active working population. We will deal elsewhere in this book with the basic challenges faced by social security systems today, such as demographic pressure and the ageing of the population (Gronchi, 1996; Chand and Jaeger, 1996), changes in the labour market and family patterns. (see Chapters 2 and 3).