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The public pension system in Lithuania was founded in 1990 when a social insurance fund, autonomous from the state budget, was established. The economic decline, high inflation, rising unemployment, the high number of those not participating in social insurance during the 1992-2000 period imposed hardships on the pension system. From the beginning of 1994, the non-governmental organisation libertarian Lithuanian Free Market Institute and Lithuanian business organisation of the Industrialists Confederation started advocating for the private pension provision. Most commonly referred arguments came from the World Bank edition Averting the Old Age Crisis. The main argument was: due to the ageing of population Lithuania, like other industrial countries, is facing challenges in providing income security for the elderly.The public pension fund financing difficulties and low pension benefits turned the Government away from social insurance towards private pension funds, beginning with the partial privatisation of the social insurance. All political parties have backed the privatisation. although with varying levels of enthusiasm (Liberals showed the highest and Social Democrats the least enthusiasm). The actual implementation of the reform was undertaken in 2004 by Social Democrats as the major partner in the coalition with Social Liberals. They chose a moderate pace and began with a small contribution and supported a voluntary switchover from social insurance to private pension funds. So, Lithuania, like some Eastern European and Latin American countries, implemented the so-called structural pension reform.The main official objective of the pension reform was to change the pension system in such a way that persons of pension age could get higher income than previously, meanwhile to ensure that the redistribution would not be increased but reduced, and to ensure the long-term financial sustainability of the system which will cover all the inhabitants. Additionally, it was expected that introduction of the private pension scheme due the pension reform will increase savings and investment and thus will promote the growth of the national economy.The key element of the reform was the transfer of 5.5 percentage points of social insurance contributions into private pension funds. However, unlike some other Eastern and Central European countries, Lithuania made its private pension system optional for employees. Persons of any age, insured by the social insurance, got the opportunity to accumulate part of their social insurance contributions in a personal account of private pension funds.During the first four years of the pension reform, by the end of2007, there were signed more than 800 thousand pension accumulation contracts between employees and managers of private pension funds. Thus, already at the beginning of the reform, almost 70 per cent of the insured for the full social insurance pension decided to participate in private pension funds. There are six assets managers and three private insurance companies in the Lithuanian pension market. They have accumulated the pension capital close to 1.7 billion Litas. Annual money transfer from the Social Insurance Fund to private pension funds (transitional costs of the reform) has reached I per cent of the GDP in 2008.Financing pension reform transitional costs comes into conflict with the financing of current pensions. High transitional costs have a negative impact on the social insurance pension budget, and it will last for several decades. If these resources were left for the financing of the social insurance pensions, they would have been higher by 20 per cent. These are implicit costs of the pension reform, which that are paid by the present generation of pensioners.Alternatively, without a reform social insurance contributions could have been decreased from the current 34 per cent to 28.5 per cent. In this sense, the costs of the reform will fall on all working population and employers, meanwhile only part of employees participate in the reform.The pension reform history' is too short for evaluation of its benefit for the private pension fund participants. Nevertheless, capital returns from pensions' assets hardly overcome inflation during the first four years of the reform. Because the high private pension fund administration costs erode participants' savings, the government needs to place a tighter control on administrative costs.The earning-related part of the social insurance pension will be reduced for participants of the private pension funds proportionally to the reduced part of the contribution for the social insurance (about 30 per cent) due to the fact that part of the contribution has been transferred to the private pension fund. Because of a rapid increase of public pensions, the loss of the reform participants will be substantial. In this respect, the State's commitments and the scope of social security to the future pensioners will be reduced by the part of the privatised pension. It is not in line with the ILO Convention N 102 which says that the State must take responsibility for the social security benefit.Prior to the reform, one of the arguments was the necessity to increase investment into the national economy. However, 90 per cent of pensions' assets are invested abroad, and there are very few investments into shares of domestic companies. Moreover, heavy investments in public versus private assets, high administrative costs, the oligopolistic pension industry, and low competition because of consumers' myopia have a negative impact on the future pensions' benefits.All the parties involved in the reform designing argued for the necessity of reform implementation by referring to the current problems which cannot be resolved by the reform. Moreover, they set objectives that may hardly be obtained by the reform in its implementation. The content of the reform is very narrow if compared with what was planned at the beginning of the reform discussion and what the initial reform documents mentioned. On the contrary, the reform has a list of negative consequences on the current and future pensioners' welfare. ; Šiame straipsnyje analizuojama prieš penkerius metus pradėta Lietuvos socialinio draudimo senatvės pensijų struktūrinė reforma, kurios metu dalis socialinio draudimo įmokų pervedama į gyventojų pasirinktus privačius pensijų fondus. Šio straipsnio tikslas - apžvelgti reformos pradžioje jai keltus tikslus, įvertinti jų pagrįstumą socialinės apsaugos ekonomikos teorijos požiūriu, išanalizuoti pradinius pensijų reformos rezultatus. Siekiant šio tikslo išanalizuotas pensijų reformų regione pobūdis, socialinio draudimo pensijų dalinio privatizavimo Lietuvoje ypatybės, kelti privatizavimo tikslai ir besiformuojanti privačių pensijų rinką Lietuvoje. Straipsnyje remiamasi pasaulyje gerai žinomų pensijų ekonomikos tyrėjų publikacijomis, pensijų reformą reglamentuojančiais Lietuvos Respublikos įstatymais, Lietuvos valstybės institucijų skelbiama ekonomine ir socialine statistika.Autoriaus atlikta analizė rodo, kad privačių pensijų fondų klientų asmeninėse kaupiamosiose pensijų sąskaitose kaupiamo turto investicijų grąža nepadengia nuostolių, kuriuos jie patirs dėl dalinio pasitraukimo iš socialinio draudimo pensijų sistemos. Straipsnyje taip pat parodyta minėtos pensijų reformos našta, kuri tenka dabartiniams pensininkams. Pagrindinė straipsnio išvada - reformos tikslai buvo per daug ideologizuoti, o pirminiai rezultatai nepalankūs nei dabartiniams, nei būsimiems pensininkams. Lietuvoje 2004 metais įvykdytos pensijų reformos analizė akademinėje literatūroje pateikiama pirmą kartą.

Vertical redistribution refers to the transfer of income from those who have more than they need to those who are in need and is related to the levelling of income inequality and poverty. Vertical redistribution over the life course is indicative of the capacity of the welfare state to protect against social risks over the life course. Studies that explore such redistribution often rely on the life-course perspective and use secondary cross-sectional rather than primary data.The goal of the current study is to analyse the impact of social benefits on income inequality and poverty over the life course in the Baltic States. The paper focuses on the three Baltic countries commonly characterised by successful economic performance, low income redistribution and high income inequality. With this aim, analyses of micro-level data of EU-SILC of 2015 was conducted. To evaluate inequality changes across the life course, the study used a decomposition of the Gini index. Evaluation of poverty of different cohorts rested on the gap of the poverty rate between different groups and the average poverty rate in the country. The findings of our study suggest that the impact of social benefits on the reduction of income inequality is modest. Highest poverty rates are linked with the periods of childhood, working age when unemployed and old age. Overall, the context laden with high inequality and poverty cannot ensure adequate protection against social risks over the life course and create a "buffer" for the development of human capital.

Straipsnyje analizuojama jaunimo dalyvavimą politikoje lemianti institucinė struktūra. Darbo tikslas – pateikti jaunimo dalyvavimą politikoje lemiančių institucijų aprašą. Institucijos yra suprantamos racionalaus pasirinkimo neoinstitucionalizmo teorijos perspektyvoje. Jaunimo dalyvavimą politikoje lemianti institucinė struktūra yra analizuojama remiantis Elinor Ostrom pasiūlyta institucijų analizės perspektyva. Institucijas išreiškiantys teisės aktai buvo analizuojami naudojant kokybinę turinio analizę. Rezultatai atskleidžia, kad Lietuvoje iš esmės jaunimas gali dalyvauti politikoje. Tačiau jaunimo dalyvavimas politikoje nėra pastiprinamas ir žvelgiant pro racionalaus pasirinkimo teorijos prizmę nelabai motyvuojamas – yra daug išlaidų, susijusių su dalyvavimu, o nauda ir pastiprinimas yra menki.

Despite the fact that stability of labor share in national income is a key foundation in macroeconomic models, scientists acknowledge, that in the last three decades it has been declining around the world. The Baltic countries are not an exception; they follow similar patters to large economies, thus the research aims at determining economic factors at play. With the help of error correction model and time series data covering the past twenty years, we determine factors which contribute to the decline of labor share in the Baltic countries. We find significant long-term relationships between labor share and government spending, trade openness, and emigration. Government spending exhibits the highest contribution to variance of labor share in Lithuania, which also explains a large part of Latvia's labor share variations. We find many similarities between the analyzed countries, however some differences are also visible.

Despite the fact that stability of labor share in national income is a key foundation in macroeconomic models, scientists acknowledge, that in the last three decades it has been declining around the world. The Baltic countries are not an exception; they follow similar patters to large economies, thus the research aims at determining economic factors at play. With the help of error correction model and time series data covering the past twenty years, we determine factors which contribute to the decline of labor share in the Baltic countries. We find significant long-term relationships between labor share and government spending, trade openness, and emigration. Government spending exhibits the highest contribution to variance of labor share in Lithuania, which also explains a large part of Latvia's labor share variations. We find many similarities between the analyzed countries, however some differences are also visible.

The goal of this paper is to analyze the political participation of youth in Lithuania. Political participation can be analyzed in different ways; in this work, the institutional structure of participation is analyzed. We use the rational choice neoinstitutionalism as a tool for the conceptualization of youth political participation. According to Elinor Ostrom, one of the representatives of rational choice neoinstitutionalism, an act ofpolitical participation is conditioned by seven sets of institutions as rules: position rules, boundary rules, choice rules, aggregation rules, information rules, payoff rules and scope rules. These are the elements of institutional structure of youth political participation in Lithuania that were analyzed. The institutions are written in legislation. The selected legislation was qualitatively analyzed using the software MaxQda 12.The results were grouped according with the seven sets of institutions that determine the actions of actors in an action arena. It can be said that there are opportunities for youths to participate in politics and policy implementation process. However, the main function of the youth is to provide information for policy makers. There are direct ways to get the opinion of youth related to certain policies – surveys, legislative initiatives, and indirect ways through collective agents, such as JRT, SJOT and LiJOT. The political participation of youths requires a lot of expenses (especially in human resources, headquarters establishment and management as well as other material resources and access to mass media), but the benefits of political participation are weak. ; Straipsnyje analizuojama jaunimo dalyvavimą politikoje lemianti institucinė struktūra. Darbo tikslas – pateikti jaunimo dalyvavimą politikoje lemiančių institucijų aprašą. Institucijos yra suprantamos racionalaus pasirinkimo neoinstitucionalizmo teorijos perspektyvoje. Jaunimo dalyvavimą politikoje lemianti institucinė struktūra yra analizuojama remiantis Elinor Ostrom pasiūlyta institucijų analizės perspektyva. Institucijas išreiškiantys teisės aktai buvo analizuojami naudojant kokybinę turinio analizę. Rezultatai atskleidžia, kad Lietuvoje iš esmės jaunimas gali dalyvauti politikoje. Tačiau jaunimo dalyvavimas politikoje nėra pastiprinamas ir žvelgiant pro racionalaus pasirinkimo teorijos prizmę nelabai motyvuojamas – yra daug išlaidų, susijusių su dalyvavimu, o nauda ir pastiprinimas yra menki.

Despite the fact that stability of labor share in national income is a key foundation in macroeconomic models, scientists acknowledge, that in the last three decades it has been declining around the world. The Baltic countries are not an exception; they follow similar patters to large economies, thus the research aims at determining economic factors at play. With the help of error correction model and time series data covering the past twenty years, we determine factors which contribute to the decline of labor share in the Baltic countries. We find significant long-term relationships between labor share and government spending, trade openness, and emigration. Government spending exhibits the highest contribution to variance of labor share in Lithuania, which also explains a large part of Latvia's labor share variations. We find many similarities between the analyzed countries, however some differences are also visible.

Despite the fact that stability of labor share in national income is a key foundation in macroeconomic models, scientists acknowledge, that in the last three decades it has been declining around the world. The Baltic countries are not an exception; they follow similar patters to large economies, thus the research aims at determining economic factors at play. With the help of error correction model and time series data covering the past twenty years, we determine factors which contribute to the decline of labor share in the Baltic countries. We find significant long-term relationships between labor share and government spending, trade openness, and emigration. Government spending exhibits the highest contribution to variance of labor share in Lithuania, which also explains a large part of Latvia's labor share variations. We find many similarities between the analyzed countries, however some differences are also visible.