The Changing EU “Pension Programme”. Policy Tools and Ideas in the Shadow of the Crisis

The aim of the present chapter is to summarize the main traits of what we call the “EU pension programme”, which is made up of three main fields of intervention: the completion of the EU pension market; the financial sustainability of pension programmes; and the broader modernization of national old-age retirement systems. While the first area is related to EU law (the Community method), the two latter dimensions have been progressively integrated into the EU economic and social governance (both contained within the European Semester that avails itself of several legal bases underpinning Macroeconomic and Fiscal coordination as well as the socioeconomic objectives of the Europe 2020 agenda). The key issue explored in this chapter is the evolution of the EU pension programme before and after the economic and sovereign debt crises as well as its (potential) influence on the “new pension mix” in the Member States. Looking back at the past decades of EU policy decisions in the field, we develop two research questions: has the EU pension programme influenced the pension mix in the Member States?; and, has the EU pensions programme changed since the emergence of the economic and financial crisis?