Under the project A pension system for the future (with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation), we publish here IPP Policy Paper 13: The public and political debate on pensions in Portugal, by IPP researchers Daniel Carolo, Luís Teles Morais and Joana Andrade Vicente.
In this Policy Paper, a synthetic and critical view of the current state of the public and political debate about the pension system in Portugal is presented.
Strong dissent continues to exist not only at the political level, but also at the technical level, on the diagnosis of the system’s short, medium and long-term financial equilibrium, and on how to deal with a certain social heritage. Both the “left” and the “right” sectors have contributed to the persistence of these difficulties in the debate, persisting in some vices of argument and conceptual inaccuracies.
It has been found that the debate has been inconsequential, contributing to the low understanding by the citizens about the functioning and challenges of the system, and to less transparent political decisions that seem to favor grandfathering.