Italy: The Italian pension system. Reform trajectories and open issues

We start by focusing on the main issues concerning the public scheme and then move to assess the evolution and the role of the private pillar. The appraisal of the private pillar – that even after the reforms is supplementary and residual with respect to the public pillar – is better understood once the possibilities and limits of the public scheme are pointed out. In more detail, after a brief overview of the characteristics of the Italian pension system and of the content of the main reforms (Section 2), we review the aims of the reforms introduced from 1992 up to 2020 to assess whether these aims have been achieved (Section 3). Following that, we focus on what we consider as the main issue characterizing the Italian pension system, i.e. the risk of inadequacy of the pension that will be paid in the NDC scheme to the increasing share of workers with unsuccessful careers (Section 4). Afterwards, we move to the private pillar, discussing its evolution in recent years (Section 5). Section 6 concludes reviewing the main open issues and proposing some policy suggestions dealing with these issues.