The pension reform, also in the ways and in the temporal analysis of the negotiations in progress, seems to have become the object of exchange in complicated political matches whose nature is understandable only to a few workers but escapes economic and social rationality; there is a sense that the task entrusted to the negotiations is largely that of rationalizing ex-post, even at the technical level, choices that find their main justification in the balance between political and financial interests essentially unrelated to the need that the pension system carries out efficiently and effectively its economic and social functions. Naturally, there are many “internal” motivations that justify the need for a serious and lasting pension reform with which, among other things, we could put an end to that long-lasting dripping of interventions, even announced only, that continues to create destabilization and exaggerate the financial problems that everyone says they want to solve. However, the ongoing debate continues to be unduly influenced by ‘external’ motivations that often respond to partial or in any case contradictory interests not only with the need to reorganize the social security system but also with the more general ones of economic and social development. On the other hand, in our country it is historical tradition that the pension system is ‘used’ instrumentally for different purposes and counterproductive with respect to its institutional tasks; perhaps this is the thread that can summarize a large and significant part of the problems in which it has been debated for years and from which it has difficulty getting out.

For example, when the management of self-employed workers (direct farmers, artisans and traders) was set up in the 1950s and 1960s, there was certainly an answer to the right need to extend the pension coverage to these categories, but the same definition of the technical-actuarial parameters of the social security calculation mechanism was inappropriately conditioned by the need for consensus of the political class of the era. Today, after about forty years and the two Amato and Dini reforms, the self-employed continue to benefit from an actuarially incoherent pension calculation mechanism; in fact they pay contributions equal to 15% of their declared income (against 32.7% of employees) and receive services commensurate to 20% (net of the widespread additions that in fact further increase the rate of calculation of pensions) . Other privileges, also born essentially of political consensus needs, were subsequently granted to civil servants who were recognized (not without further discrimination within them) more favorable calculation mechanisms and the possibility of early retirement (so-called ‘baby’ pensions) ).
These privileges, at least in part, still exist. In recent years, the progressive and natural ‘maturation’ of pension management (the settlement of higher pensions resulting from the accumulation of longer seniority contributions), the substantial aging of the population and the decline in the growth rates of the economy have undoubtedly increased the pension funding problems. However, the actuarial mechanisms of the system had already been turned upside down by measures of welfare policy and industrial policy that granted benefits unrelated to the contribution, unjustifiably burdening the budgets of social security management, which therefore appeared and appear passive even when they are active. This is the age-old question of the lack of separation between social security and assistance that has yet to be completely resolved and continues to feed the instrumental alarms of those interested in weakening the public pension system. The consents to this objective have grown since the 80s with the strengthening and the diffusion of financial interests that see the development of private supplementary pensions in the reduction of public pension coverage. Also in this case we are dealing with ‘external’ motivations and in many cases contradictory with the collective need to efficiently redistribute part of the current income from the assets to the retired; in fact, since the greater security and lower costs of managing a public and mandatory pension system are incontrovertible, any collective interest associated with the diffusion of the Supplementary Funds is essentially traceable in the hope that this will contribute to making our financial market more ‘often’.
In any case, the growing demand for tax relief for supplementary pensions and requests to favor closed-ended funds compared to open-ended ones contradict, on the one hand, the need to improve public finances and, on the other, the need to develop new and more autonomous financial institutions. The devaluation of ’92, the prevailing restrictive economic policy in Europe, the constraints of Maastricht and the consequent increased need to reorganize our public accounts have contributed to generating other and widespread ‘external’ motivations for intervention on the public pension system; it has been identified as a ‘financial reservoir’ to draw upon to improve the public budget and as an ideal field of intervention to credit the international market ‘rigidity’ of our economic policy and its suitability for our entry into Monetary Union. Moreover, the duplication of unemployment rates across Europe caused by a certain ‘rigorous’ conception of economic policy is generating ever more widespread convictions about the opportunity for its revision, not only to relaunch employment and development, but also to complete the consolidation of public accounts and the European unification project. In any case, to improve the public budget – an objective that concerns the entire nation – we continue to support the need to subtract resources from the subset of citizens financially involved in the social security system. These unfair redistributive consequences, together with the consideration that the financial results of a structural reform such as that of the welfare state have much longer times than the conjunctural needs related to the Maastricht constraints, once again highlight the negative influence on the pension system that may derive from juxtaposition of ‘external’ objectives. These are not the results that await us from the desirable reappointment of responsibility on the part of politics.