From the Recovery and Resilience plans to the Medium-term Fiscal-structural plans: the case of pension policy

of extending their fiscal-adjustment path from four to seven years in exchange for a "relevant set of reforms and investments" commitments, to be included in the newly devised National Medium-Term Fiscal-Structural Plans (MTFSPs). We argue that this makes the MTFSPs similar and thus comparable to the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs), apart from one significant difference. While the NRRPs were the product of an unprecedented external crisis which sparked an equally unprecedented EU fiscal solidarity, the MTFSPs were readied in what we call an adversarial environment, marked by the return of binding fiscal rules and surging defence and security spending. In this paper, we ask how this shift has affected pension reform commitments. Two different views emerge. One strand of the literature holds that the EU governance architecture remains predominantly oriented towards commodification. As such, a shift towards an adversarial environment further compounds this pre-existing stance, so that pension commitments tilt toward benefit cost-containment, longer working lives, and supplementary pensions. A second strand of the literature holds instead that, despite the notable absence of the NRRP’s fiscal transfers, the new MTFSPs could have decommodifying pension commitments, such as increased social contribution, on the back of increasingly “socialized” EU socio-economic governance instruments. We examine these expectations against the pension commitments of all eight Member States on the seven-year track (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Finland, France, Italy, Romania, Spain). We coded the reforms along a novel five-part typology, in a systematic comparison of pension commitments across NRRP and MTFSPs. We find that commodifying reforms are more numerous in relation to the MTFSPs commitments, and above all reform extending working lives, while the isolated cases of decommodification-oriented commitments of the NRRP, largely driven by Spain alone, are mostly absent in the MTFSPs. When including reforms enacted outside the plans, a detectable decommodifying countercurrent emerges, which partly counterbalances any clean commodification reading of pension reform trajectories. Overall, the evidence leans towards the commodification expectation: an already market-making EU governance, compounded by the adversarial environment, widens the reach of commodifying pension reforms, while decommodification finds only limited support and travels mainly through domestic channels.