Dr%20Marek%20Naczyk: List of publications

Why has Russia been able to develop and produce Sputnik V while Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries that are members of the European Union have only played a marginal role in global supply chains for the production of vaccines against COVID-19? We argue that this capacity results from efforts by Russia’s national security state and entrepreneurs to turn a Soviet advantage in the development of biological weapons into a contemporary public health advantage in vaccine and drug development. CEE countries have lacked Russia’s historical legacy of and contemporary drive for security motivated statecraft. Nor have they massively invested – as for example Cuba has – into their public health systems and in potential synergies between such systems and biotech firms.

With rare exception, political economists assume that developmental policies and developmental alliances between states and business result from top-down, state co-option or coercion of business. They also do not expect the subsidiaries of multinational corporations (MNCs) and their local, non-expat, managers – the ‘compradors’ – to press for developmentalism in host countries. Based on process tracing of Polish economic policy since the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC), I argue that, in Poland’s dependent market economy and FDI-led growth regime, ‘comprador’ bankers co-opted state actors into renationalizing foreign-owned Polish banks and into reforming development institutions to support indigenous firms’ expansion. Moreover, comprador bankers operationalized new industrial policies for which state actors, indigenous entrepreneurs and ‘compradors’ simultaneously started pressing in the 2010s. Comprador bankers’ motives were their frustration at their weak managerial autonomy in foreign-headquartered MNCs and their concerns about the negative macro-economic implications of their parent banks’ attempts to capture their Polish subsidiaries’ excess liquidity during the GFC in order to improve their own liquidity positions.

Studies of the rise of private defined-contribution pensions traditionally focus on social policy concerns about the allocation of risks and costs for beneficiaries and employers. There is, however, another – low-salience, financial – dimension of pension privatisation. Regulations introducing minimum return guarantees in private pensions impact financial markets because they incentivise fund managers to invest plan portfolios in fixed-income securities rather than in equities. While different segments of the financial industry have divergent preferences over such guarantees, policy-makers are caught in a dilemma: Should they prioritise predictable benefit levels or equity market development? Using the case of the introduction of Germany’s ‘Riester-Rente’, we argue that, as politicians linked the introduction of private defined-contribution plans with cuts in statutory pensions, the re-emergence of a high-salience, social policy image of pensions helped insurance firms’ and some trade unionists’ case for minimum guarantees to prevail, thereby hindering equity market development in Germany.

While in Western Europe occupational plans dominate private pension provision, coverage of such plans is marginal in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Previous literature has shown the World Bank’s instrumental role in persuading CEE countries to divert part of their social security contributions towards mandatory personal pensions. The dominance of the Bank’s model of pension privatization from the mid-1990s largely explains the marginalization of occupational plans. However, as this model has been challenged since the late 2000s, occupational pensions have re-appeared on the agenda. To shed light on the changing politics of occupational pensions, this paper focuses on the role of organized interests – namely employers’ associations, trade unions and financial groups – that are key players in Western Europe, but whose role has been understudied in CEE. The paper follows these actors’ activities in the last three decades of pension politics in Poland, i.e. one of the few CEE countries to have promoted occupational provision. It shows that, although organized interests had limited policy expertise and mainly mobilized social consent for – or opposition to – reform in the early phases of post-communist pension reform, the growing organizational resources of business groups – in contrast with unions – make them increasingly influential actors in reshaping the contours of CEE private pension provision.

Since the global financial crisis, those East European countries that had partly privatized their pension systems in the 1990s or early 2000s increasingly scaled back their mandatory private retirement accounts and restored the role of public provision. What explains this wave of reversals in pension privatization and variation in its outcomes? Proponents of pension privatization had argued that it would boost domestic capital markets and economic growth. By revealing how pension privatization helped increase sovereign debt and how large a part of pension funds’ assets was invested in government bonds, the crisis strengthened the position of domestic opponents of mandatory private accounts. But these actors’ capacity and determination to reverse pension privatization depended on the level of their country’s public debt and on pension funds’ portfolio structure. Empirically, the argument is supported with case studies of Hungarian, Polish and Slovak pension reform.