This article analyses pension reforms in Central and East European countries in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The crisis revealed unresolved problems in the implementation of previous reforms, namely the financing of the transition costs. In their attempts to solve the funding-gap issue, the reforms needed to address legacies of past choices as well as the exceptional circumstances of the crisis. The interaction of fiscal constraints and political conditions shaped the variety of these reform outcomes.

Since the global financial crisis, those East European countries that had partly privatized their pension systems in the 1990s or early 2000s increasingly scaled back their mandatory private retirement accounts and restored the role of public provision. What explains this wave of reversals in pension privatization and variation in its outcomes? Proponents of pension privatization had argued that it would boost domestic capital markets and economic growth. By revealing how pension privatization helped increase sovereign debt and how large a part of pension funds' assets was invested in government bonds, the crisis strengthened the position of domestic opponents of mandatory private accounts. But these actors' capacity and determination to reverse pension privatization depended on the level of their country's public debt and on pension funds' portfolio structure. Empirically, the argument is supported with case studies of Hungarian, Polish, and Slovak pension reform.

In this article we investigate the flexibility strategies of foreign automobile producers in three Central and Eastern Europe countries, where employment flexibility has become a major issue and an area of conflict with unions. We focus on nine subsidiaries in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, and argue that flexibility strategies were shaped by parent company practices, the flexibility needs of individual affiliates and the relative strength of labour in negotiating the implementation of these practices. Given the relatively weak industrial relations institutions in the region, the relative strength of labour is conditioned primarily by market factors and parent company contexts. The findings thus highlight the importance of political resources and agency of actors in shaping employment policies.

Attempts to replace pay‐as‐you‐go pension schemes with private funded systems came to a halt in Central and Eastern Europe after 2005. However, more recently, the region has witnessed two belated reformers: the Czech Republic and Romania. Both countries decided to partially privatize pensions despite the rising tide of evidence concerning the challenges associated with the policy. We argue that while part of the domestic political elite remained supportive of private funded pensions, the difficulties experienced by earlier reformers and reduced support from International Financial Institutions led to the adoption of small funded pension pillars. Such cautious attempts at privatization might become more common in the future as large reforms have proven politically unsustainable.

This article evaluates the pension policy pathways of the 11 former state socialist nations that have joined the European Union since 2004. Focusing primarily on the post‐2004 period, the analysis discusses the most important measurable outcomes of these countries’ pension reforms, in terms of poverty alleviation, pension adequacy and fiscal sustainability. Going beyond the quantifiable concepts, we also investigate the quality of the 11 countries’ pension systems in terms of equity as well as efficiency, emphasizing the less conspicuous design errors present in these systems. Although these errors have received little attention to date, they may harm pension schemes along several dimensions, including their fiscal sustainability.