ITALY - The pension reform in Italy is a “ ghost reform” put forward by the prime minister to “dismantle” the previous ones and “ distracts” the Italians from more pressing problems, the president of indipent think-tank Eurispes said.

Eurispes, set up in 1982, argued on Friday that keeping things as they are the pension expenditure would take up 13.9% of the Gross Domestic Product to in 2050, compared with the EU-average of 13.2%.

This result would be achieved in spite of the fact that the rate of working population above 65 in the country is estimated to reach a peak of 61.3% in 2050, about 20 percentage points above the EU- average.

The Rome-based institute also argued that although the country had the most significant ageing rate compared with other European countries, “in 2050, it will be the country with the smallest pension expenditure increase”.

Gian Maria Fara, Eurispes’ president, said that the government’s urgency to bring about a reform would be part of Prime Minister Berlusconi’s strategy” aimed at artificially distract the_Italians from problems that trouble the society, from the decline of whole industrial sectors to the erosion of the purchasing power.”

“Problems for which the government appears not to deliver credible answers”, Fara continued.

In the study ‘The pension reform: a pointless reform’, Eurispes claimed there was “ no pension-emergency at all, since the intervention policies of 1992, 1995 and 1997 brought a substantial stability between the national domestic product and the pension expenditure”.

“The three reforms of the nineties have already caused a 100 million euro saving and further saving are anticipated” said Eurispes in a statement.

The intended reform, which Eurispes also estimated would involve a total of about 800,000 workers, was described as a “too high pension wall” which “could trigger a flight of_workers in the years immediately preceding the date set for the_reform.“

“It is not a remote risk, suffice it to say that in 2003 applications for pensions have gone up by one fifth. The firmer becomes the grip, the stronger is the effect that precedes it,” he also said.