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A latecomer to supplementary funded pension provision, Italy's multi-pillarisation plan was launched in the 1990s under extremely adverse conditions. Supplementary schemes were expected to achieve universal coverage relying primarily on second pillar occupational pension funds. Twenty-five years after its launch, the comprehensive plan can hardly be called successful with respect to both coverage and the relative importance of second and third pillar institutions. Extreme variation in coverage rates between occupational categories and across economic sectors suggests, however, that these developments cannot be merely interpreted as a consequence of institutional resilience and path-dependent dynamics. The article applies an 'actor-centred institutionalist' framework to respond to three main questions. What explains the still limited coverage of supplementary pillars in Italy? What factors account for the prominent role played by third pillar pension schemes in contrast to policy-makers' original intentions? Which factors allow us to understand the significant variation in coverage across both occupational categories and economic sectors?

AbstractThe supranational strategy 'Europe 2020' came along with two main innovations for social policy coordination in the EU: a quantified poverty reduction target and a new governance framework – the 'European Semester'. Aiming to assess the effectiveness of the novel strategy in prompting the emergence of a European(‐ized) anti‐poverty arena – thus inherently multilevel and multi‐stakeholder, as well as integrated (across policy sectors) – the article first presents the strategy evolution at the supranational level in 2011–14. Then it analyzes its implementation in five member states – Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the UK – through the first four annual cycles. By directing the analytical focus on processes – rather than outcomes – in order to capture the domestic changes produced by the Europe 2020 anti‐poverty strategy, the article argues that the latter marked significant discontinuity with the Social Inclusion Open Method of Coordination. The new strategy increased the political salience of the poverty issue both at the supranational level and in the selected member states, while leading to a 'competence clash' between national governments and the EU in Germany, Sweden and the UK. The emergence of such main tension substantially constrained the Europe 2020 potential in these three countries. Differently, in Italy and Poland, the implementation was smoother and the effects along the participation and integration dimensions were more evident. We contend that national policy legacies, the relevance of EU social funds, as well as partisan preferences, help to explain the differential effects of Europe 2020. The article concludes by suggesting that recent decisions at the EU level might eventually bring European anti‐poverty coordination beyond soft‐law towards 'hybrid' governance solutions.

"In the field of anti-poverty policies, the interplay between the Europe 2020 overarching strategy and the "Semester" have marked major discontinuity vis à vis the Social OMC of the Lisbon phase. This book therefore asks whether and how Europe matters in the fight against poverty and social exclusion by assessing the emergence and possible institutionalization of a European multi-level, multi-stakeholder and integrated policy arena in the new institutional framework. Supranational developments, multilevel interactions, as well as effects at the national level are explored in six European countries - Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland, UK and Sweden. The book also aims to capture the key factors affecting the implementation of the Europe 2020 anti-poverty strategy.This book will be of key interest to students, scholars and practitioners in social policy, political science and European governance, and more broadly to European Union politics, European integrations studies, sociology and economics."--Provided by publisher.

"This book examines the growth of careers outside a traditional standard employment pattern and how those in "atypical jobs" will fare in retirement, analyzing how the interplay between labor market reforms/trends and pension reforms will affect income security in old age during future decades"--

Increasingly flexible labour markets and reforms of old-age pension systems are still ranking high on the political agenda of European countries. This volume investigates whether, and to what extent, the interplay between pension reforms and the spread of 'atypical' employment patterns and fragmented careers has a negative influence uponeconomic security in old age. The volume, therefore, analyzes the flexibility-security nexus by focusing on the post-retirement phase, thus extending the conventional narrow concept of 'flexicurity'. The book also questions whetherreforms of public and private pension schemes compensate or aggravate the risks of increasingly flexible labor markets and atypical employment careers after retirement? Around this overarching research question, the various contributions in the volume employ the same analytical framework in order to map, and then compare, the developments in seven European countries - Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, and the UK ₆ which present different labour market arrangements and various degrees of flexibility, as well as diverse pension systems.

AbstractTraditionally at the margins of the political debate, minimum income protection has recently become a key issue in Italian politics. After decades of social and political "neglect" letting Italy the only European country (with Greece) still lacking an anti‐poverty minimum income safety net in the 2010s, finally a national programme called Inclusion Income was introduced in 2018, then replaced by a more robustly financed scheme, the Citizenship Income in 2019. The introduction of these new programmes was the object of an intense political debate, which raises two main puzzles. Why a policy field characterized by the low political resources of would be beneficiaries and low incidence on the overall welfare budget has become so important in the political debate? How did it occur in Italy, where minimum income protection had been absent in political discourses for at least five decades after World War II? To answer these questions, this article first elaborates a novel theoretical framework which combines the main properties of socio‐political demand and political supply in order to explain the scope and direction of minimum income reforms. Second, it provides an analytically oriented reconstruction of MIS policy trajectory in Italy in the three different phases: the phase of MIS "neglect" (1948–1992) characterized by inertia; the period of political "contentiousness" (1993–2012), marked by attempts of path departure followed by policy reversals; the more recent phase leading to the introduction and institutionalization of a MIS. Third, the article provides a theoretically framed interpretation of the overall MIS trajectory in Italy.