ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the existing literature on the politics of pension privatization and presents the actors – including business ones – who are at the center of the endogenous processes. It also presents the two cases studies of Hungarian and Polish pension privatization. Students of the politics of social policy in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) rarely pay attention to the influence of business. Pension privatization has contributed to create sizable private pension fund industries that have managed assets totaling several percentage points of the gross domestic product of CEE countries. In the mid-2000s, some World Bank officials pressed the Bank to consider the disadvantages of pension privatization more carefully. Transition costs and concerns about growing sovereign debt became the main driver of pension privatization reversals in the CEE region after the 2008 global financial crisis. Following the 2008 global financial crisis, Hungary and Poland rolled back their second pillars, but in different ways.
