The impact of structural pension reforms on the macroeconomic performance: an empirical analysis

Whether pension reforms lead to an improvement in macroeconomic performance is a controversial question. Some countries, which have implemented reforms, claim better economic performance while in others a positive result has yet to be seen. This paper explores two aspects of this issue further: Firstly, we provide a comprehensive investigation of the impact of pension reforms on output, capital stock and consumption. Secondly, we attempt to uncover the factors which lead to cross country heterogeneity in the impact of reform. Our results suggest that pension reform led to an improvement in macroeconomic performance. However, there is also evidence to suggest that this improvement was more pronounced in countries with lower public debt, lower age dependency ratio, more developed financial markets and a higher rate of privatisations