The global fin an cial crisis of 2008 brought eco nomic, polit ical, and social challenges for many coun tries. With the eco nomic crisis, unemployment increased from 5.6 percent in 2007 to 8.2 percent in 2009 in the OECD area (OECD 2010). In the spring of 2010, while many eco nom ists as sumed that the global eco nomic crisis had passed, the Greek fin an cial crisis and its signi fic ant threat on the EU region showed that eco nomic recovery remained very fragile. In addition to the unsuccessful eco nomic pol icies and tax collection prob lems, too high pension expenditures were con sidered to be the main reasons of the crisis. Therefore, in the summer of 2010, the Greek par lia ment approved the pension reform increasing the retirement age and retrenching pension bene fits as part of the solution to the coun try’s debt crisis. In addition to eco nomic crises, demographic changes which led to a gradual increase in the ratio of older to younger people have given rise to substantial pressures for reforms in pension pol icies, par ticu larly as the large baby boom cohorts begin to exit the labor market (Foot and Stoffman 1996; OECD 2000; Boeri et al. 2002; Immergut et al. 2007; Tepe and Vanhuysse 2009 and in this volume). There is con sider able discussion in the liter at ure as to whether the pressures of globalization and demographics bring convergence across wel fare states, or whether wel fare states follow their traditional wel fare regime paths in pension reforms (Pierson 2001; Swank 2002; Castles 2004). Socio-economic challenges and the need to reform wel fare programs have often led to claims of a ‘crisis’ of the wel fare state as a result of growing new social expenditure demands (O’Connor 1973; OECD 1981; Mishra 1984; Offe 1984). For other researchers, the con tempor ary trends in wel fare state de velopment represent retrenchment, and pension reforms across OECD coun tries are the key indicators of this de velopment (Brown 1988; Starke 2006; Meyer 1998; Green-Pedersen 2002; Häusermann 2010). Contrary to the neo-liberal convergence thesis, however, some studies show that while the demographic and eco nomic challenges are sim ilar across OECD coun tries, different wel fare states have de veloped varying retirement and employment pol icies fol low ing their institutional paths (EspingAndersen 1999, 2002; Pierson 2001; Castles 2004; Aysan and Beaujot 2009; Busemeyer 2009; Tepe and Vanhuysse 2009).