Paul Johnson is Professor of Economic History and Deputy Director of the London School of Economics. He has written extensively on the history of welfare, and on the economics of ageing and pensions. His most recent publication is the co-edited Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain (3 vols., Cambridge University Press, 2004). He has served as an adviser on pension reform to the World Bank and the UK government. Address is Department of Economic History, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK. Email: p.a.johnson@lse.ac.uk

Camila Arza is Marie Curie Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre (European University Institute, Florence) and researcher at the Economics Department of the Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO-Argentina). She is currently conducting a research project dealing with comparative analysis of pension reform trajectories in European countries, with a focus on the distributional outcomes of the latest reforms in Italy, Sweden, Poland, and the United Kingdom. Previous research focused on the social and distributional impacts of social policy, structural reform, and privatization both in developed and developing countries. Address is VF008, Villa La Fonte, Via delle Fontanelle, I-50016 San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy. Email: camila.arza@iue.it