Reforma da Previdência Social: simulações e impactos sobre os diferenciais de gênero

Abstract

In a context of population aging and great labor market informality, discussions on how to make public pension systems solvent in the near future are being raised all over the world, and also in Brazil. The reform proposals usually include the tightening of benefits to contributions, which reduces the systems expenditures and makes the systems actuarially fairer. At the same time, because different groups (as men and women) may present different labor market activity, the proposals may have distinct distributional consequences on these groups. This work contributes with the debate of the pension system reform in Brazil showing how some police changes, usually pointed as urgent to make the system fiscally balanced, can have different gender impacts.Using micro-simulation techniques and based on PNAD 2006 we estimate how different eligibility rules for retirement and survival benefit, and also for the social assistant benefit for the elderly (the BPC) can have different gender income outcome in the old age. Also, we estimate the potential effects of each new rule on the System expenditures, counterbalancing its distributional effects on income. The results show that under all and each changing rule elderly women would have their mean income decreased relative to mens, increasing income gender differentials of the elderly, and also increasing income inequality among this group. Nonetheless, the results also show that each rule would have impacts of different magnitudes over each dimension analyzed (income distribution and expenditures decrease) and must be analyzed under different criteria.