Roger Charlton - Pensions in Development

For our pensioner parents

Elsa W.B. Charlton, May McKinnon and Iain McKinnon

As far as conversational no-go areas are concerned, genital warts and crabs are right down there along with pensions

Jordan, 1999

In all the 365 days of the year are Rulers Days, whether the ruler is a political party or the military, and it is decent of them to lend some of them to the United Nations for occasions like Childrens Day and Womens Day and the altogether unnecessary Senior Citizens Day. I call it unnecessary because the rulers may be doing something for women and children in their own way, but the Senior Citizen s Day obliges them to tell lies, make silly promises and use up all their stock of cliches. All said and done, the senior citizens stuff in is good fiction, if not bad farce.

Rahman, 2000

ROGER CHARLTON

School of Social Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian University

RODDY MCKINNON

Division of Risk, Glasgow Caledonian University

First published 2001 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2018 by Routledge
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ISBN 13: 978-1-138-72174-6 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-315-19418-9 (ebk)

ROGER CHARLTON is a Reader in the School of Social Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland.

Roger Charlton has published extensively in the fields of African politics, development studies, and international political economy. He has held research fellowships at Birkbeck College, University of London and at the University of Botswana. His recent research and consultancy has focused on Botswana and Uganda.

RODDY McKINNON is a Research Fellow in the Division of Risk, Caledonian Business School, Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland.

Roddy McKinnon, formerly of the UK Benefits Agency, has published in the fields of the international political economy of old age pension systems and social security reform but also ranging more widely across the field of development studies, with a particular focus on developments in francophone Africa.

This volume has had a lengthy gestation. For Roddy McKinnon, its origins date precisely to 1987 when he completed an undergraduate dissertation on the developmental states of East and Southeast Asia, leading to research focused on the Malaysian EPF (McKinnon, 1996). For Roger Charlton, origins are more diffuse but crystallised in the early 1990s in work on the importance of the financial bases of autonomy in the developmental state (Charlton, 1993; Charlton and Donald, 1995). We worked jointly from 1995, initially on the political economy of the NPFs of Southeast Asia, moving inexorably into the consideration of wider issues relating to pension system development and reform, as we responded in a somewhat piecemeal fashion to the World Banks highly successful attempt to define a global pension reform agenda. Building on publications that have ranged widely across pension reform issues in transition states and developing countries, this book represents our consolidated, albeit still developing, perspectives on key developmental issues relating to old age/retirement pensions provision.

Pensions provision, reform and restructuring present the researcher with a classic set of comparative problems, raising the complex set of methodological issues associated with a limited number of cases and a multitude of variables - too many to be easily encompassed and enforcing selectivity. In turn, approaches to pension systems are framed by wider considerations relating to what, until comparatively recently, was called social security and more recently has been termed social protection, an increasingly encompassing term incorporating both social insurance and social assistance approaches. Currently, this area of study and policy aspires to be designated additionally, and sometimes alternatively, as involving problems of social risk management (Holzmann and Jorgensen, 1999, 2000; Lund and Srinivas, 2000). In relation to this expanding universe of concepts and practice, our findings are tentative and our suggestions provisional. We define our work as falling within the parameters of a specific approach - pensions in development (PID) - to the relationships between pension systems and socio-economic development, widely defined. In contrast to the radical PID approach, exemplified in World Bank publications, our more moderate approach seeks to balance welfare aims and economic development agendas more evenly. Our primary interest, reflected in the final and longest part of this volume, is, first, in the problems and policy needs of low income countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa and, second, in those of middle income countries. In pursuing this developing country (DC) focused agenda, the book is structured as follows:

overviews and critiques the on-going tendency towards the crystallisation of a global pensions reform monologue;

debates the welfare and developmental implications of currently dominant and fashionable reform agendas and proposals;

concentrates on central but problematic elements within the currently dominant radical PID approach to pension system reform and restructuring, particularly questions relating to state management versus pensions privatisation, and introduces issues relevant to the problems posed by pensions funding options.

outlines and evaluates regional trends in pension reform implementation, seeking to distil appropriate reform lessons, both positive and negative;

using examples, predominantly from middle and low income countries (MICs; LICs), seeks to build greater flexibility into fashionable pillared proposals, specifically advocating the continuing relevance of public management.

, presents pension system options for LICs and MICs with a particular focus on the identification of mechanisms and instruments for achieving universality in coverage and for providing at least a minimal cash income on a regular basis to the elderly;

proposes an expanded consideration of additional and alternative instruments for, and approaches to, the provision of financial support in old age in DCs;