How do economic theories and economistst inform policies in various institutional settings? A historical analysis of the pension system in Spain
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2019-09-04
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en
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Abstract
It is said that economists are the most influential social scientists in public policy. However, their power is sometimes ambiguous and varies across different institutional settings and according to concrete policies.
This work looks at the Spanish public policy that receives the greatest amount of state resources, the pensions.
First, it provides a historical analysis of the birth and development of the pension system. In doing so, it argues that the system was created under a fascist regime and its basic foundations come from an authoritarian party, highly interventionist and protectionist. Furthermore, this essay will claim that although democracy brought some reforms, they were not able to change the foundations of the structural problems of the system.
Second, the work will follow the framework of Hirschman-Berman (2014), to analyse the economists’ influence in this historical process. It argues that this influence was completely marginal due to path dependencies, the fixated relationship between Spanish politics and technical economic knowledge and the perception that the pensions are a societal issue instead of an economic issue.
Key words: pensions, Social Security, public-policy, economists, economic policy, economics.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen