ABSTRACT
Pension provision to be widely defined to include all existing modalities for providing cash to the old either on a regular, income, and basis or in the form of a lump sum. It needs to be underlined that this ‘investment’ case for public pensions funding is made in full awareness of the convincing arguments against the crude, ‘picking winners’, versions of industrial policy, and with a similar awareness of the care needed in appropriately defining the focus and emphasis of public investment programmes. The Bank’s approach to pension’s policy, in turn, equates neatly to one possible type of ‘growth-oriented social policy’, which, appropriately, is similarly epitomised by Chile. The Bank’s pensions reform agenda is based on the assumption that savings grow best when they are placed in the hands of private sector fund management ‘professionals’. The recent and earlier attempts of individual international organisations to constrain the pension’s policy options available to individual state.
