Pension Incomes in the European Union: Policy Reform Strategies in Comparative Perspective

This paper considers the effects on current pensioner incomes of reforms designed to improvethe long-term sustainability of public pension systems in the European Union. We useEUROMOD to simulate a set of common illustrative reforms for four countries selected onthe basis of their diverse pension systems and patterns of poverty among the elderly:Denmark, Germany, Italy and the UK. The variations in fiscal and distributive effects on theone hand suggest that different paths for reform are necessary in order to achieve commonobjectives across countries, and on the other provide indications of the appropriate directionsfor reform in each case.