PENSION REFORM IN ROMANIA AND ITS IMPLICATIONS ON PENSION ADEQUACY FOR WOMEN

The pension system in Romania has undergone successive reforms, parametric and structural, determined by a complex of factors such as the demographic aging, the significant external migration, the changes in the employment structure, the globalization and the growing of the international competition. However, the changes brought to the system have not been accompanied by gender impact studies. The current pension system, build in accordance with the World Bank model, put more emphasis on the contribution principle, the items of redistribution being very few. This particularly affects women, since women often have lower participation in the labour market, more frequent career breaks, being overrepresented in low-paid occupations and having a higher share between people with atypical employment contracts, and thus likely to accumulate lower retirement rights than men. Our study performs a careful analysis of the Romanian pension system in terms of complying with the principles of gender equality. The methodology includes the examination of the legislative framework, as well as the assessment of the pension adequacy for men and women based on a microeconomic model. Our approach takes into account the calculation and comparison of gross and net theoretical replacement rates for men and women with different career and income profiles, using certain assumptions about the economic and demographic variables. Our study confirms the existence of gender inequality in the pension system today. The system design is largely responsible for the replication of gender inequalities that exist in the labour market. The awareness of these issues is an important step in fostering policy makers to take measures towards promoting the gender equality in the pension field.