Institutional Interests and Institutional Change. Poland on the Second Wave of Pension Reforms

The paper discusses mandatory funded pensions seen as a novelty of the first wave of "paradigmatic" pension reforms in emerging market economies and as an institutional device in the very centre of the recent post-2008 change. Evidence from Poland is examined in the context of the pension reform engineering. The central question is for whose welfare or benefit the open pension funds (OFEs) were introduced and why they have been scaled down recently. The perspective taken here is to explain the processes through reconstruction of major interests involved. Under the assumption that the state is the main force at play, the economic and political interests of this party are reconstructed and discussed. The proposition that rising deficits and debts within general government sector provided stimuli for both rise and decline of the OFEs is the very start of the diagnosis. The paper argues that apart from the undesirable outcome of current debt accounting there were fundamental reasons of strategic nature for which government lost its positive interest in the OFEs as an institutional (that is long-run) device