Berry, C;
(2021)
Pensions imperilled: The political economy of private pensions provision in the UK.
Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK.
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Abstract
Private pensions provision in the United Kingdom is in crisis—but it is not the crisis often depicted in political and popular discourses. While population ageing has affected traditional pensions practice, the imperilment of pensions is due in fact to the incompatibility of pensions provision’s peculiar temporality with the financialization of the wider economy. This book offers a political economy perspective on the development of private pensions, focusing specifically on how policy elites have sought to respond to perceived crises of demographic change, undersaving, and fund deficits, and in doing so absorbed imperatives to subject individuals to a market-led regime under the influence of neoliberal ideology. This terrain is explored through chapters on the historical and comparative context of UK pensions provision, the demise of collectivist provision, the rise of pensions individualization (and the state’s role as facilitator and regulator in this regard), and the financial and economic context in which pensions provision operates. The book offers an original understanding of the unique temporality and materiality of pensions provision, as a set of mechanisms for coping with generational change and forecast failures in capitalist economies. Accordingly, it also offers a nuanced account of pensions statecraft, challenging a tendency in the existing literature to focus on the boundary between state and market, rather than how the pensions market operates (and the state’s role in this). The book ends by outlining a coherent and radical programme of progressive pensions reform, steeped in the author’s experience as a policy practitioner.
| Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| Title: | Pensions imperilled: The political economy of private pensions provision in the UK |
| ISBN-13: | 9780198782834 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/oso/9780198782834.001.0001 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198782834.001.0001 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| Keywords: | pensions, political economy, public policy, financialization, generational change, neoliberalism, welfare, investment, statecraft, British politics |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > Inst for Innovation and Public Purpose UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10152562 |
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