ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades, a wave of pension reform has spread across Europe. Demographic change has challenged future pension finances and pushed governments to bring the uncomfortable issue of reform to the top of the political agenda. With the explicit aim to achieve long-term financial sustainability, most European countries have embarked on a process of reform which ranged from small parametric adjustments to the radical redefinition of the pension systems set up over the twentieth century. However, the long periods of transition typical of reforms in the pension arena make it still difficult to appreciate the specific social impacts of these changes. While projections indicate that most reforms have improved the financial prospects of European pension schemes, mainly by reducing the growth of public pension expenditures, the distributional effects of these financial adjustments remain largely unknown.
