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Abstract The rural pension policy in China is characterized by a high degree of instability. In the past 15 years since the introduction of pilot schemes in some regions, the state has been unable to establish a stable institutional framework for rural old‐age security. This article seeks to integrate the theoretical insights from a growing body of international literature on the role of ideas in social policy reform in order to shed new light on the study of Chinese rural pension policy. I argue that the rise of the rural pension scheme and its eventual failure to make consistent progress towards a comprehensive system is directly related to conflicting ideas among bureaucrats with respect to what sort of welfare provision the rural elderly actually need. The fluctuations in this policy realm vividly illustrate the predominance of the policy idea that peasants could still rely on their land and family, supplemented by private commercial insurance, in their old age. Given this alleged self‐reliance on the part of rural residents, the state is very reluctant to set up a comprehensive rural pension scheme. As a result, the old‐age security of the peasants in rural China is standing on very thin ice, and the prospect for more active state involvement in the near future remains dim.

"For nearly seventy years, the military retirement policy remained unchanged-requiring retirees to serve twenty years in order to receive the military's highly desirable, traditional, defined-benefit pension. How has it remained so durable for so long, and what needs to change as the military adapts to the twenty-first century? Brandon J. Archuleta explores the history and development of the military pension through the lens of the autonomous policy subsystem. Through extensive fieldwork and interviews with sixty policymaking elites-including congressional staffers, veterans' lobbyists, blue ribbon commissioners, and even senior Pentagon policymakers-Twenty Years of Service gets inside the military personnel policy subsystem and reveals how these institutions managed to monopolize military retirement policy by maintaining the rigid status quo. Archuleta's research reveals major organizational issues that have significant bureaucratic and policy implications for the Pentagon. Congress and veterans' groups have been able to dominate the policymaking process, undermining the military's ability to adapt to a new policy environment. As the military aims to attract the next generation of young recruits for the twenty-first century All-Volunteer Force, Twenty Years of Service is a timely and relevant contribution to the field with lessons for scholars and policymakers wrestling with the future of American defense policy."

After decades of recurrent improvements in the generosity of public pension programs, since the early 1980s many pension reforms aimed to decelerate pension spending growth and strengthen the finances of these programs by retrenching the duration and/or value of pension entitlements. To understand this historical reversal in public pension provision, this article examines the forces affecting the enactment of contemporary pension retrenchments in 19 OECD countries. Based on a synthetic review of the pension policy literature, it identifies 90 pension retrenchments passed in these countries between 1981 and 2004. A growing literature on pension policy reform suggests that these policy events occur only when policy-makers can devise mechanisms to reduce their political blame. Building on this research, this article argues that the strategic consideration of economic and electoral cycles constitute two blame-avoidance strategies. First, by passing a pension retrenchment early in the electoral cycle, policy-makers can expect to face less electoral retaliation. Second, due to uncertainty in demographic projections, the demographic transition constitutes a weak discursive strategy to legitimate pension retrenchments. For this reason, population aging only affects the likelihood of reform by increasing the impact of economic crises. The article presents results from conditional frailty models for recurrent and sequential events that support this argument.

The Green Paper provoked angry headlines after fixing 70 as the compulsory retirement age and reducing pension income. This article outlines some ideas and findings for developing pension issues at the EU level and examines possible impacts on national pension systems. The recent financial crisis showed the deficiencies of capital-funded pensions. Discussions at EU levels should to consider unemployment, childcare or taking care of frail persons in achieving adequate pensions. The question arises as to whether earnings-related schemes as main source of income in old age are still feasible. Different taxation of retirement pensions, additional contributions for healthcare, long-term care and the lack of coordination rules for supplementary pensions may impede free movement. Better coordination is needed. EU wide solutions for pension systems seem inevitable in a converging Europe for reasons of social cohesion and competition. There should be a minimum standard for all European citizens in old age that guarantees sufficient financial means, adequate healthcare and access to professional long-term care.

This paper reviews and evaluates public policy towards private pensions which has developed in the U.S. over the past 60 years. It is shown that research results reported in the literature are not sufficiently conclusive to permit resolution of all, or even the most important, efficiency questions that surround pension policy. Given available information, a series of policy recommendations are made to either retain or alter current federal policy towards pensions. Unanswered research questions that prevent a more definitive set of conclusions are identified and discussed

A promising approach to pension policy preferences focuses on the influence of policy related information. We advance this research programme by examining the impact of information about future pension benefits, including whether information effects occur through priming, learning or both. Drawing on a novel, split-sample survey experiment in the US, Germany and Spain, we examine the impact of information on forecasted pension replacement rates for 2040 on pension policy attitudes. Findings indicate that the information treatment increases support for the two outcomes considered: (i) increases in the pensionable age and (ii) greater spending on pensions relative to other social programmes. Analyses of heterogeneous treatment effects accounting for prior beliefs of participants show that information effects occur both through priming and learning. The study concludes that hard, non-partisan information increases support for reforms that foster the financial sustainability of pension systems, although the scope of information effects depends on contextual conditions.