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Steffen Heinrich (University of Duisburg Essen)

5 December 2013 @ 14:00 - 16:00

 

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Date:
5 December 2013
Time:
14:00 - 16:00
Event Category:

“The employment-pension nexus in Coordinated Market Economies: a Comparative Study of Germany and Japan since 2001”

abstract

This presentation analyses the implications of the pension reforms for employment relationships and HR policies in the two prime examples of coordinated market economies (CME), Germany and Japan, in the past 10 years.  While studies of recent public pension reforms exist in abundance, there is very little study of corporate pension schemes.  This is unfortunate as occupational pensions have been identified as an important institution for stabilising long-term employment relationships in coordinated market economies as the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) (Estevéz-Abe 2001).  This presentation aims to fill this gap in the literature, and to contribute to the ongoing debate on the nature of changes occurring in coordinated market economies.  A wave of series of corporate pension reforms that started in 2001 led many observers expect the rise of “pension fund capitalism” and a gradual de-coupling of long-term employment practices and welfare arrangements in particular in CMEs such as Germany and Japan. The presentation will show that significant institutional de-coupling has indeed occurred in both countries but that it cannot be adequately described with widely used concepts such as institutional convergence or divergence. Instead, the case of occupational pension reform highlights a growing institutional diversity within CMEs.