José Piñera

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José Piñera

José Piñera Echenique (born October 6, 1948 in Santiago de Chile ) is a Chilean politician and economist .

Life

Piñera attended the Universidad Católica de Chile and received a professorship at Harvard University in 1974 . Between 1978 and 1980 he was Chilean Labor Minister and between 1980 and 1981 Mining Minister under the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet . As labor minister in Chile, he carried out fundamental structural reforms: for example, he replaced the state pension insurance system with a privately organized, funded system based on private pension funds . He also dismantled workers' rights and privatized the mining industry. In 1981 he resigned as Mining Minister.

Piñera, who is one of the so-called Chicago Boys , founded the magazine "Economia y Sociedad" in 1982 to spread his economically liberal ideas.

It is generally assumed that the pension reform he initiated would have met with much stronger opposition in a democratic state because of its radical nature. This was also evident in later pension reforms in other Latin American countries; Since the governments there were almost all democratic at the time, the Chilean model was seldom adopted in its pure form, but rather compromise solutions such as parallel and mixed models were sought. Argentina, for example, combined a state pension system with fixed benefits with the Chilean pension fund model.

After the transition in Chile , Piñera founded the “Agenda Chile 2010” project. In 1992 he won the mayoral elections in Conchalí, a poor district of Santiago de Chile. His candidacy in the Chilean presidential election in 1993 failed.

Piñera is now director of the "International Center for Pension Reform" institute, which he himself founded, with the aim of converting all public pension insurance systems around the world to a capital-based approach. He has also been with the Cato Institute , one of the most powerful liberal business think tanks, since 1995 . Piñera even advises some governments on issues related to converting national pension systems to capital-based systems, especially in Eastern Europe. His pension policy recommendations, however, repeatedly met with criticism from economists. José Piñera is also controversial because of his collaboration with the Pinochet regime.

The privatization of the Chilean pension system

Initially, Piñera did not justify the privatization of pensions with the prospect of higher returns. Rather, he criticized the existing state pension as an instrument of power by means of which citizens would be forced into dependence on the state. He claimed that private pension fund customers would acquire contractually enforceable property rights, while a state pension could only offer abstract commitments. According to Piñera, the main difference between the two pension schemes is that there are no reserves for the transfer pension, so there are no tangible capital goods in which someone can dispose of property rights. Therefore, according to Piñera, the amount of the pension must always be at the disposal of political arbitrariness. Critics object that the private pension funds used in the funded system are exposed to considerable capital market risks. At least the investments of the contributors are protected against a possible bankruptcy of private insurance companies, since in this case the savings are transferred to another pension savings company. The employees' savings are not affected by the bankruptcy of a pension savings company, as the latter merely manages the assets, but cannot borrow or access them.

Further arguments put forward for Piñera's pension privatization were the hoped-for stimulating effects on the economy and the creation of an incentive against widespread fraudulent contributions. It is controversial whether these goals were achieved. A study by the Chilean Central Bank, carried out by Klaus Schmidt-Hebbel and Vittorio Corbo, comes to the conclusion that the reform has generated new investment capital, increased participation in the formal sector of the labor market and boosted economic productivity. Others, on the other hand, believe that the reform is fraught with considerable problems. The leading World Bank economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz published an essay together with Peter R. Orszag in 2001 , in which both criticized pension reforms of the Chilean type. Stiglitz and Orszag do not generally reject funded systems, but conclude that the benefits that are often ascribed to them are overrated. Ultimately, funded and pay-as-you-go systems differ in their effects by far less than what advocates of funded systems believe, according to the authors. Later empirical studies, for example by the internationally renowned economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago, confirmed the criticism of Orszag and Stiglitz in many respects. For example For example, in 2000 the number of active contributors in Chile was just 60 percent, although the reform was also introduced with the express aim of significantly reducing the amount of tax evasion widespread in Chile. Self-employed and informal employees generally do not pay into the system.

family

José Piñera is the older brother of Sebastián Piñera , who served as Chilean President from 2010 to 2014 and was re-elected President of the country in the 2017 presidential election. Bernardino Piñera Carvallo , the oldest living Roman Catholic bishop in the world since 2016 , is an uncle of the brothers.

Honors

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.39.3484&rep=rep1&type=pdf
personal data
SURNAME Piñera, José
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Piñera Echenique, José
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chilean economist and politician
DATE OF BIRTH October 6, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Santiago de Chile