ABSTRACT

Retirement pensions are at once the most ‘national’, ‘institutionalized’ and globalized of all areas of social policy – an assertion that this chapter and Chapter Seven will attempt to justify. The object here is to examine how pensions systems in different regimes are changing in response to a range of factors, exogenous and endogenous, the growing demands of which appear to be compromising the traditional, institutionalized bases of income security in later life.