Even though the need for pension insurance in Serbia was established over one hundred years ago, today, over 120,000 citizens over the age of 65 do not receive a single form of pension. The institution of social pensions for the poorest is long-established around the world, and recently in the region, but this measure of social protection for the elderly has yet to be on the agenda in domestic lawmaking.
Author: Dunja Karanović
In a youth-obsessed culture, the topic of retirement is rarely present in popular movies and TV shows. However, over the past ten years, because of the demographic trend of the aging world population (and thus the movie-going public), the representation of older people and the relationship of society towards aging has steadily improved in Hollywood.
On the one hand, there are representations of well-off (white) retirees who, despite their relatively comfortable lives, are fighting loneliness and boredom, like A Man on the Inside (2024) and Thursday Murder Club (2025). On the other hand, there are darker films which are far more relevant to the realities of aging in the 21st century, dealing with the impossibility of exercising the right to a dignified life after retirement. The main trio in the movie Going in Style (2017), played by Alan Arkin, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Caine, lose their pensions when the company they worked for their whole lives declares bankruptcy. Without income and adequate health insurance, they decide to rob the bank which took over the company’s pension fund to pay off its debts.
Even though it is not based on real events, this comedy is a testament to the inadequacies of the pension system in the United States, where social insurance on the basis of current (pay-as-you-go) financing amounts to about 40% of average income during employment and is considered a supplement to far riskier individual, privatized savings. The extent of elderly poverty in the USA is even more visible in the film Nomadland (2020), which follows the lives of middle-aged and elderly people who lose their homes due to their lack of income and become seasonal workers. The character of 60-year-old Fern (Frances McDormand), who is adapting to life in a camper in her old age, is based on real “pensioners” whose stories were documented in the book of the same name by the journalist Jessica Bruder.
The foundations of the pension system in most countries today were set at the end of the 19th century and can be roughly divided into two models, the so-called Bismarck model, which the Iron Chancellor implemented in Germany in 1889, and the Beveridge model, first implemented in Denmark in 1891 (named after the British economist William Beveridge, who is often considered the chief architect of the welfare state). The goal of the Bismarck model, which originally applied to industrial workers who reached the age of seventy, is the relative living standard, that is maintaining the income which an individual earned during their working life, while the goal of the Beveridge model is the absolute living standard, that is reducing elderly poverty regardless of contributions.
It’s important to mention that in Bismarck’s case, implementing pension insurance was a way for Germany to deal with worker’s strikes and the growing influence of socialists, while William Beveridge was a member of the Eugenics Society, so besides universal social assistance he suggested separate children’s allowances for the wealthy and educated. Regardless of the political goals of their creators, over the subsequent decades, both models led to the establishment of pension and disability insurance as a basic right for workers, and in a way which combines the principles of absolute and relative living standards—that is why, among other reasons, today we have the institution of the minimal pension, but also calculation of contribution rates. As the economist Dr. Katarina Stanić explains in her study The Pension System in Serbia (2010), “the pension system is considered adequate if it meets both goals.” We can consider the universal access to pension insurance, which grants a basic pension to all residents regardless of contributions, an inheritance of Beveridge’s model, while the targeted approach of this system (paying out minimal compensation only to those who did not receive an adequate income) is a legacy of Bismarck’s model.
Social insurance in Serbia was first implemented in the 1920s, but the legal frameworks of today’s pension and disability insurance system were essentially established in socialist Yugoslavia after World War Two. With the Law on Social Insurance in 1946, Yugoslavia equalized all workers regardless of the type of work they perform. After the Institute for Social Insurance was founded, the state became the official insurance carrier. According to a Law in 1950, the conditions for retirement was 35 years of pensionable service (minimum 15 for partial pension) and age requirements of 65 years for men and 55 for women. Two years later, the minimum old-age and family pensions were defined at 4,500 and 3,500 dinars respectively (at that time, the average salary was around 8,000 dinars).
There was a connection between contributions during one’s working life and the pension amount, that is the principle of work-based distribution, as the philosopher and activist Ivan Radenković noted, because “the length of pensionable service in the socialist Yugoslav society meant the contribution of individuals to the social community,” (2016). During the 1950s and 1960s in Yugoslavia, there was an increase in the contribution of old-age and family pensions to the GDP. In the 1970s, reduced annual productivity led to stricter criteria for pension eligibility. According to Radenković, in the beginning of the 1980s, Yugoslavia entered a debt crisis, and in 1987 the Republic Pension and Disability Insurance Fund became insolvent. The wars of the 1990s led to hyperinflation, sanctions, and a market reduction which caused the Serbian GDP to diminish by ⅔. To finance the war the state emptied the pension funds and racked up massive debt towards pensioners. Rampant privatization and company dissolution forced many workers into early pensions, which, among other demographic factors, meant that in 1999 there was only one active fund contributor for every two pensioners.
The 2005 law raised the threshold for old-age pensions to 65 years for men and 60 for women. The 2014 law began the gradual equalization to 65 years for both sexes (projected to end in 2031) and implemented penalties for early retirement as well as a maximum working life of 45 years. That same year, because of the International Monetary Fund’s request that the fund for pensions and salaries in the public sector decrease by 10%, the state implemented austerity measures which temporarily reduced all pensions over 25,000 RSD monthly. It also stopped indexation, the adjustment of pensions according to wages and prices, which turned the purchasing power of pensioners into a subject of political decision-making. These austerity measures were revoked in 2018 after pensioners were deprived by about 840 million euros. The decision on gradual equalization of conditions for old-age pensions still stands.
Unlike the American system of individual savings, the Law on Pension and Disability Insurance in Serbia is based on the principle of intergenerational solidarity, that is a pay-as-you-go system. In other words, the contributions of 2,365,745 employed persons, which is how many The Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia record in Serbia for October 2025, pay for old-age, disability, and family pensions for 1,660,055 pensioners registered in the statistics of the Republic Pension and Disability Insurance Fund for the same period. Many insured persons today believe that the solidarity principle is an unfair burden inherited from socialism, and that individual savings and the capitalist model would lead to better living conditions. However, in practice, it is clear that any form of privatizing institutions of social protection leads to an increase in the gap between the richest and poorest in society because the neoliberal approach of “bootstrapping” does not take into account structural inequalities.
In the current system, the average old-age pension, which around 1.1 million citizens earn, is 54,285 RSD. The average family pension (319,435 recipients) is 41,072 RSD, disability (223,069 recipients) 46,219 RSD, while the average agricultural pension is 21,978 RSD (124,303 recipients). According to the Republic Pension and Disability Insurance Fund statistics for November 2025, the total average was 50,658 RSD, which is 45.7% of the average net salary of 110,670 RSD (for comparison, in 2012 this ratio was 56%), that is, a whopping 6,210 RSD less than the average consumer basket (56,868.37 RSD in August 2025). The at-risk-of-poverty rate in Serbia in 2024 was 19.7%, but for those older than 65 this rate was 23.6%, that is 25% when considering only women 65+.
According to statistics from the Association ““Žene na prekretnici,” (Women at the Turning Point), every fourth woman over 65 lives at risk of poverty due to factors such as lifelong inequality on the labor market, weaker pension coverage, lower average pensions (28,605 RSD) and worse pension structures. Only 47,5% of women receive the most favorable, old-age pension (compared to 74% of men), and a significant 11% of women receive no pension at all (compared to 5.5% of men). If Going in Style was filmed in Serbia, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and Alan Arkin would be women between 55 and 64, who were declared redundant in the 1990s and spent over 10 years in unemployment after that, without the possibility of requalification and without a chance to exercise their right to old-age pension on the basis of pensionable service.
In contrast to those who believe that pension system reform should go in the direction of privatization, the Association “Žene na prekretnici” advocates for poverty-suppressing measures among the elderly by implementing the institution of social pensions—non-contributory benefits for citizens over 65 without pensions or earnings from work. This measure, explains Miroslava Perišić, president of the Association’s board of directors, would be especially significant for older women:
“Implementing social pensions would doubly benefit women and represent an important step towards gender equality. Above all, social pensions would improve the existing inequality between people over 65 who did not achieve the right to any form of pension. There are almost twice as many women as men in that group. An equally important effect is preventing future poverty. Implementing social pensions would protect women who are now facing the risk that by the time they reach 65, they will not meet conditions for old-age or any other form of pension, allowing them to secure a minimum of social security in their old age,” Perišić points out.
The statistic that women would make up most of the recipients of social pensions comes from the study “A Simulation of the Implementation of Social Pensions in Serbia (Simulacija uvođenja socijalnih penzija u Srbiji)” which Marko Vladisavljević, assistant professor of the Economic Faculty of the University of Belgrade, conducted in 2025 in collaboration with the Association “Žene na prekretnici”. According to this study, 122,000 people would receive universal social pensions in Serbia, of which 77% are women, 60% residents of rural areas, and 58.3% people living below the poverty line. A social pension of 100 euros monthly would reduce the elderly poverty rate from 23.6% to 21.3%, that is from 33.9% to 31.2% in rural areas. The annual fiscal cost for this social pension amount would be 17,153 billion, that is only 0.17% of the GDP.
“The statistics unambiguously show that there is a need for implementing an institution of social pensions, whether that is a universal pension for citizens over 65, whose advantage is in the simplicity of implementation, or pensions targeting the most vulnerable, which would be implemented through means testing,” highlighted Vladisavljević at a round table dedicated to social pensions in December 2025. According to him, implementing universal social pensions without means testing is financially possible and sustainable, because implementing this policy would be simple yet would contribute to reducing the poverty rate, especially when it comes to women and rural households, and reduce the burden for citizens who are not at risk of poverty but have dependents. The relevant authorities for implementing social pension measures would be centers for social work, with the support of the Republic Pension and Disability Insurance Fund.
Almost all European Union member states have social pensions, and recently some countries in the region implemented this policy as well. A basic pension of 150 euros for all citizens over 65 is the first pillar of pension insurance in Kosovo (the amount increases for pensioners who meet the minimum work experience requirement of 15 years). In North Macedonia, all people older than 65 who are resident in the country for a minimum of 15 years and have no other source of income have a right to a social pension of 6,000 denars monthly (about 97 euros). Since this measure was implemented in 2019, over 2,600 people received the right to a social pension. Since 2025 the right to a social pension, that is a national compensation for older persons, is possible for citizens of Croatia who have no other pension, amounting to 154.5 euros monthly, on the condition that they are over 65, resident in Croatia for at least ten years and their household income does not exceed double the pension amount (309 euros).
The principle of work-based distribution unfortunately dictates that the amount of a potential social pension does not exceed the amount of the lowest contribution-based pension, which in the case of Serbia is the agricultural pension of 21,786 RSD. An amount of 100 euros a month would cover less than a fifth of the minimal consumer basket, which means that this is still not an institution of social protection which would grant all citizens the right to a dignified life. Still, the trend of implementing social pensions in the region and globally testifies to the fact that poverty in old age is slowly being looked at as a social problem which requires systemic solutions, not individual responsibility.
The author is a journalist at the newspaper Liceulice, based in Belgrade, Serbia. She combines approaches that connect policy, theory, and cultural practice through interdisciplinary and collaborative methods that foster radical friendship and collective care.
The content and views expressed in the article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Musine Kokalari Institute and the Centre for Emancipation Policies in Serbia.