Setting the Agenda: The World Bank and International Labour Organisation’s Battle to Shape Global Pension Policy

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the World Bank and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) competed to shape the global pension reform agenda. Inspired by the privatisation of Chile’s pension system in 1981 and its spread across Latin America, the World Bank promoted a partial privatisation of public pension systems across the globe. It was vehemently opposed by the ILO. The World Bank was able to use its lending capacity as leverage into the pension reform debates of the countries of Central Eastern Europe during their transition to market-based capitalism. It supplanted the ILO as the dominant international organisation in the pension reform arena as most countries in the region adopted the World Bank’s preferred pension model. However, at the onset of the of the global economic crisis, the trend went into reverse. Most countries in Latin American and Central and Eastern Europe either scaled back on their privatisation or completely abandoned it.

This thesis investigates the impact of these reversals on global pension policy. It draws on an analysis of 104 pension documents and 25 elite interviews from senior policy makers in the World Bank, ILO and Central and Eastern Europe to analyse global pension policy. It deploys an Agency, Structure, Institutions, Discourse (ASID) framework to explore the process of pension reform and counter-reform in Central and Eastern Europe, the development of the pension policies of the ILO and World Bank, and the relationship between them. The thesis tells the story of how the ILO has managed to reassert itself in the global debate and international agenda-setting process through the promotion of its flagship national social protection floors. It now works much more closely with the World Bank, which abandoned its pension privatisation campaign and works closely with the ILO to extend pensions coverage.