When will Brazil defuse its pension time bomb?

Home to the oldest population in South America — one in five people is over 60 — Uruguay passed a pension reform this year that raised the minimum retirement age from 60 to 65. The move faced some pushback from society, but not nearly as much as Uruguayans themselves expected.

With a tradition of governments more associated with progressive agendas, it was under center-right President Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou that Uruguay gradually began to change the pension system for future generations. It is a long-term project: the adjustment begins next month and will not end until 2043.

With 3.5 million people today, Uruguay is expected to lose about 20 percent of its population by 2100. Public policies on contraceptives for women and legalized abortion have contributed to a fertility rate that is far below the replacement rate in recent years.

Brazil still has a young population that is proportionally larger than that of its neighbors, but data from the latest census show that the country urgently needs to focus on caring for its senior citizens — at the risk of having to adopt even more restrictive measures than the last pension reform from 2019.

That year, Brazil mandated that men must work at least 20 years – 15 for women – to receive a state pension, and set the minimum retirement age at 65 for men and 62 for women.

The changes brought relief to public accounts, but difficulties for citizens, who will increasingly retire later in life and with more entitlement requirements. At the same time, the private pension market boomed. 

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been an outspoken critic of the 2019 reform. His social security minister, Carlos Lupi, has already...