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UNRISD welcomes such applications. The designations employed in UNRISD publications, which are in conformity with United Nations practice, and the presentation of material therein do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of UNRISD concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. The responsibility for opinions expressed rests solely with the author(s), and publication does not constitute endorsement by UNRISD.

Latin America has been a world pioneer of neoliberal, structural reform of social security pensions (' privatisation '). This article focuses on the diverse political economy circumstances that enabled such reform, analysing why policy makers have chosen such a costly strategy and how they have managed to implement it. First, in nine countries with diverse regimes (authoritarian and democratic) it examines the internal political process that led to the adoption of reform. There tends to be an inverse relationship between the degree of democratisation and that of privatisation, but the political regime alone cannot fully explain the reform outcomes in all cases. To expand the search for explanatory variables, other key factors that might have influenced the reform design are studied, among them relevant political actors (driving and opposing forces), existing institutional arrangements, legal constraints, internal and external economics and policy legacy.In the last two decades the social security pension systems of half of all Latin American countries underwent structural reform." By early 

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This article briefly explains the main features of public and private pension systems, as well as structural and parametric pension reforms. Its core compares performance, within Latin America, between private pension systems in ten countries and public pension systems in eight countries, based on nine indicators: labor force coverage, ages of retirement and pension levels, gender equality, administrative costs, wage contributions, compliance, portfolio diversification in investment of pension funds, rates of returns of investment, and financial equilibrium. Contrary to what is often maintained, the article concludes that public systems perform better than private ones in most of those indicators.

The structural reform of social security pensions is the subject of international debate, and Latin America has been a pioneer of such reform. The region has gathered experience over two decades, and had an important influence on other regions. This article gathers legal and statistical data about reform in ten countries of Latin America, in order (1) to analyse the three distinct general models followed and note the characteristics of the reforms in the different countries;(2) to evaluate the performance of the reforms against nine conventional assumptions about its effects; (3) to draw useful lessons from these reforms for the region and other countries.