| Popis: |
In Romania before 1989, as elsewhere in the Soviet world, retirement support was one of the few rewards that the regime offered its citizens. In the years which followed the overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu, the public retirement system lost the constraints imposed by a command economy, and its implicit tensions became manifest. As the dispersion of wages increased under the pressure of even proto-market forces, disparities between benefits and contributions appeared, and the pressure for tax evasion grew. Tax discipline deteriorated. This paper presents and analyses the weight of the past. It describes the institutional weaknesses of the pre-reform system and analyses the demographic pressures threatening it. It concludes with a calculation of the implicit debt of the pre-reform system in 1997. |
