The Italian pension system, historically formed through continuously overlapping layers that lacked the foundation of a unified vision and the ability to look beyond short-term effects, possessed major characteristics of imbalance and of inequality at the beginning of the 1990s. Today a further intervention in the pension system is necessary to integrate and complete (and in some respects correct) the process of rationalisation and reorganisation that began with the measures taken in 1992, and to bring the burden on future generations back to tolerable levels.

 JEL Codes: H55