After Chile, What? Second-Round Pension Reforms in Latin America

Abstract

The apparent success of Chile's pension reform catalyzed a number of subsequent reforms in sister Latin American nations, and the "Chilean model" has now captivated the attention of policymakers and researchers in the OECD as well. In this paper we identify six critical elements of old-age pension reform, and examine how these six elements differ across the Chilean reform, and several other Latin American nations that followed in Chile's footsteps. We emphasize how these other Latin American nations adopted different mechanisms to restructure their old-pension systems, and we highlight available evidence on system performance in each case.