Private accounts in Chile! Disaster

Bloglines | My FeedsChile's Retirees Find Shortfall in Private Plan
Dagoberto Sáez, retiring as a lab technician, is studying podiatry to supplement a pension of $315 a month.
Tomás Munita for The New York Times
Dagoberto Sáez, retiring as a lab technician, is studying podiatry to supplement a pension of $315 a month.

By LARRY ROHTER

Published: January 27, 2005


ARTICLE TOOLS

Printer Friendly Format Printer-Friendly Format
Most E-mailed Articles Most E-Mailed Articles
Reprints & Permissions Reprints & Permissions
Single Page Format Single-Page Format




Go to Complete Coverage

MULTIMEDIA

Paying for Pensions
Graphic: Paying for Pensions


Most E-Mailed
1.

Under One Roof, Aging Together Yet Alone
2.

Op-Ed Columnist: Torture Chicks Gone Wild
3.

'Collapse': How the World Ends
4.

Dr. Ecstasy
5.

Op-Ed Columnist: The Geo-Green Alternative
Go to Complete List

SANTIAGO, Chile - Nearly 25 years ago, Chile embarked on a sweeping experiment that has since been emulated, in one way or another, in a score of other countries. Rather than finance pensions through a system to which workers, employers and the government all contributed, millions of people began to pay 10 percent of their salaries to private investment accounts that they controlled.

Under the Chilean program - which President Bush has cited as a model for his plans to overhaul Social Security - the promise was that such investments, by helping to spur economic growth and generating higher returns, would deliver monthly pension benefits larger than what the traditional system could offer.

But now that the first generation of workers to depend on the new system is beginning to retire, Chileans are finding that it is falling far short of what was originally advertised under the authoritarian government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

For all the program's success in economic terms, the government continues to direct billions of dollars to a safety net for those whose contributions were not large enough to ensure even a minimum pension approaching $140 a month. Many others - because they earned much of their income in the underground economy, are self-employed, or work only seasonally - remain outside the system altogether. Combined, those groups constitute roughly half the Chilean labor force. Only half of workers are captured by the system.

Even many middle-class workers who contributed regularly are finding that their private accounts - burdened with hidden fees that may have soaked up as much as a third of their original investment - are failing to deliver as much in benefits as they would have received if they had stayed in the old system.

Dagoberto Sáez, for example, is a 66-year-old laboratory technician here who plans, because of a recent heart attack, to retire in March. He earns just under $950 a month; his pension fund has told him that his nearly 24 years of contributions will finance a 20-year annuity paying only $315 a month.

"Colleagues and friends with the same pay grade who stayed in the old system, people who work right alongside me," he said, "are retiring with pensions of almost $700 a month - good until they die. I have a salary that allows me to live with dignity, and all of a sudden I am going to be plunged into poverty, all because I made the mistake of believing the promises they made to us back in 1981."

With many Chileans finding themselves in a situation much like that of Mr. Sáez, people are still looking to the government, not private pension funds, to ensure a secure retirement.

"It is evident the system requires reform," the minister of labor and social security, Ricardo Scolari, said in an interview here. Chile's current approach based on private pension funds has "important strengths," he said, but "it is absolutely impossible to think that a system of this nature is going to resolve the income needs of Chileans when they reach old age."

In formulating proposals in the United States for individual accounts, advocates of partial privatization of Social Security have sought to overcome some of the problems in Chile. They have suggested, for example, setting low limits on the fees that fund managers will be allowed to charge and continuing to provide a major part of retirement income through the traditional system of guaranteed payments.

The program in Chile differs from the voluntary model that President Bush is considering. Participation here has been not voluntary for people entering the labor force since 1981.

On the other hand, Chile was careful before it started its private system to accumulate several years of budget surpluses, in contrast to the recent large deficits in the United States.

The Chilean example also makes clear that introducing private accounts does not solve a lot of the problems faced in the United States, Europe and Japan, where pay-as-you-go systems remain the principal means of government retirement support.