Robert Holzmann

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Robert Holzmann (born February 27, 1949, in Leoben, Styria – a historic province of central Austria) is an Austrian economist with a distinguished career in both academia and international organizations. He held various positions at the University of Graz (1973–1975), University of Vienna (1975–1992), and University of Saarland 1992–2003), and worked at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (1985–1987), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (1988–1990), and the World Bank (1997–2011). At the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C., he served as Sector Director (1997–2009), Research Director (2009–2011), and acting Senior Vice-President (2002–2003). From 1983 to 2005, he directed the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Economic Policy Analyses (Vienna). He currently holds honorary positions at the University of Malaya (Kuala Lumpur) and the University of New South Wales (Sydney). He is a Research Fellow at IZA (a German labor market think tank in Bonn) and CESifo (Munich). In 2014 he was elected Full Member (Fellow) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He consults for governments, international organizations, and research institutions.

Holzmann holds various editorial and advisory positions, including: Associate Editor‒ Journal of the Economics of Ageing; Associate Editor, Economics – E-journal; Member and Chairman of the Advisory Board ‒ EcoAustria Research Institute; Board Member ‒ Austrian Economic Association; Member ‒ Advisory Council of IIF Business School (New Delhi, India); Member‒ Advisory Board of Center of Development Studies (University of Rome II – Tor Vergata); Member – Editorial and Advisory Board of International Journal of Social Security and Workers Compensation (Australia); Member – Editorial Board of Journal of Public Policy; Member – Council of Advisors, Population Europe; and Distinguished Associate – Atlantic International Economic Society.

Holzmann’s research and operational involvement extends to all regions of the world. He has published 34 books and over 150 articles on social, fiscal, and financial policy issues. An avid traveler for both work and pleasure, he has visited over 80 countries and is fluent in German, English, French, and Spanish.

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Educational background

Raised in Styria, Holzmann studied economics at the Universities of Graz (Austria), Grenoble (France), Bristol (England), and Vienna (Austria). He received an M.A. in economics in 1972 (Graz), a doctorate in economics in 1977 (Vienna), and a "habilitation" (kind of a second Ph.D.) in 1983 (Vienna), at which time he was promoted to Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Vienna. Holzmann’s Ph.D. thesis on the Austrian pension system involved development of the first large-scale simulation/projection model in Austria, among the first of its kind in Europe (Bös and Holzmann 1976; Holzmann 1979). His habilitation thesis on intertemporal income distribution deepened his understanding of the role and limits of public policy as well as markets but also of the importance and limits of simulation techniques (Holzmann 1984, 1990). His work on this topic and the interaction between lifetime consumption, lifetime income, and intertemporal redistributive outcomes profited greatly from a research stay at the University of Bristol in 1982 and the intensive interaction with and guidance of Angus Deaton (the 2015 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Holzmann’s interest in policy-relevant modelling and strategic economic and social policy thinking would become the touchstone for the rest of his career.

Career highlights

Holzmann’s lengthy career oscillated between academia and international policy institutions ‒ he claims he missed the policy action when in academia and the time for contemplation when in international organizations. In his varying capacities, Holzmann held guest professorships at, inter alia, Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo), La Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Santiago), and Southwestern University of Finance and Economics (Chengdu); he lectured, inter alia, at Harvard University (Boston) and Oxford University (Oxford, UK); and he consulted for the Austrian National Bank, the Commission of the European Union, the Council of Europe, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GTZ, now GIZ), the International Labour Organization, the IMF, the International Social Security Association (ISSA), the OECD, and the World Bank.

While on leave from the University of Vienna, Holzmann joined OECD’s Social Affairs Team in 1985 to establish its pension data base and wrote the policy think piece on "Reforming Public Pensions" (Holzmann 1988). Upon his return to Vienna in 1987, he was invited to join the IMF’s Fiscal Affairs Department. Hoping to leave behind pensions and return to broader fiscal and macroeconomic policy issues and looking forward to working on developing countries, he was instead thrown back into pension work on fiscal issues in Hungary and Poland before and during their transformation. He was involved in rethinking their social programs as those countries acknowledged the need to focus there as well as on their moves from centrally planned to market economies. This engagement led to Holzmann’s subsequent analytical and policy work on pensions and other social programs across essentially all Central and East European reform countries (Holzmann 1997b).

In 1992 the University of Saarland offered Holzmann a full professorship and a position as chair of the Institute of International Economic Relations as well as managing director of the Economic Section of the European Institute (a post-graduate institution with teaching staff that included Paul de Grauwe and European Commission staff and officials). This allowed him to return to his initial intellectual interest (European monetary integration), to work on Western European integration, and to teach authoritatively on Eastern European transitions. The 1990s were the heyday of discussing the Maastricht treaty implementation and preparing for introduction of the Euro; the European Institute offered intellectual stimulus and corrections to the debate. Yet Holzmann’s warning about the construction issues of the Euro and the likely consequences were little heard (Holzmann, Herve, and Demmel 1996; Demmel, Herve, and Holzmann 1999).

Holzmann was recruited to join the World Bank in 1997 under the leadership of James Wolfensohn, the just-appointed president. Out of 232 international candidates, he was selected to head the newly established Social Protection and Labor Sector. Given the University of Saarland’s budget cuts as part of a further bailout of the state of Saarland, Holzmann had strong incentives to once again leave academia and return to Washington, D.C. He was motivated by the intellectual and managerial challenges of this new World Bank sector, and derived great satisfaction from successfully addressing them. His notable achievements there include:

A widely applauded strategy for this new sector and the development of its intellectual underpinnings, which moved social protection from being a synonym for mere hand-outs (often resented) to a concept of social risk management (SRM) that provides a strong economic and social rationale for such interventions given the many risks to which the poor are exposed (Holzmann and Jorgensen 1999, 2001). The implications of SRM were detailed in a sector strategy (World Bank 2001), became a foundation of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty, and were embraced by the development community. As such, the concept became a cornerstone for economic and social development across the globe, and SRM is now used as a conceptual framework for social programs by both developing and highly developed countries.

The knowledge management approach for the sector and the development of analytical and operational products to help governments design and implement better policies in the area of social protection and labor. Internationally recognized products include: PROST, the Pension Reform Options Simulation Tool used by almost 100 countries across the world; analytical products published in the Social Protection Discussion Paper Series; and creation of three core courses on pensions, labor and employment, and social assistance. The pension core course started as a collaboration with Harvard University and was co-directed with Jeffrey Sachs and Larry Kotlikoff. Holzmann is recognized worldwide for his research on pensions, including on topics such as: the impact of moving from unfunded to funded provisions on economic outcomes (Holzmann 1997a, 1999); the measurement of implicit pension liabilities (Holzmann, Palacios, and Zviniene 2001, 2004; Holzmann 2014b); and pension reform issues.

Development of a pension reform strategy for World Bank client countries that offered a new vision while taking into consideration political, economic, and administrative constraints (Holzmann and Stiglitz 2001; Holzmann and Hinz 2005). Holzmann’s engaged debates with Joe Stiglitz (then World Bank Chief Economist and Nobel Laureate in Economics in 2001, the year their joint book was published) led to a sharpening of arguments on both sides of the debate over whether or not to fund pensions. Holzmann’s 2005 publication with Hinz was critically reviewed by Peter Diamond, another Nobel Laureate in Economics. As part of this intellectual exercise Holzmann, like Peter Diamond and Nick Barr, became a main driving force for analyzing the design, strengthening the implementation, and covering the knowledge gaps of Notional or Non-financial Defined Contribution (NDC) schemes such as those introduced in Italy, Latvia, Poland, and Sweden (Holzmann and Palmer 2006; Holzmann, Palmer, and Robalino 2012, 2013). Holzmann was a strong proponent of NDCs as the core element of a pan-European pension approach (Holzmann 2006, 2015b).

The rekindling of interest in labor market issues in developing countries at the World Bank and beyond, including development of strategies and knowledge products and creation with IZA of a joint program on "Employment and Development" in 2006. Now the largest research network on the topic, Holzmann co-directed this program with Klaus Zimmermann until 2011. His own research contributions to the employment debate from a social protection angle comprise, inter alia: the first comprehensive publication on severance pay, an effort that took eight years (Holzmann and Vodpivec 2012); the role of the zero pillar in coverage expansion (Holzmann, Robalino, and Takayama 2009); and the role of matching contributions for coverage extensions (Hinz, Holzmann, Takayama, and Tuesta 2013).

The introduction of promising new areas into the development discourse, such as financial literacy and education, migration, and portability of social benefits. The exploration of new ideas in social protection and labor was often financed by World Bank trust funds generously provided by various countries’ development agencies (e.g., Austria, Finland, Germany, Italy, Korea, Norway, Switzerland, and the Russian Federation); Holzmann excelled in soliciting their interest and generosity.

On financial literacy and education, Holzmann initiated and guided a large research team whose work offered an analytically convincing alternative to traditional conceptualization and measurement proposals (Holzmann 2011; Holzmann, Mulaj, and Perotti 2013). He initiated and led research on how to make migration a win-win-win situation for migrant-sending and -receiving countries and migrants (Holzmann and Muenz 2004; Holzmann and Pouget 2010). Lastly, Holzmann initiated and is still the leader of economic research on the international portability of social benefits (Holzmann, Koettl, and Chernetsky 2006; Holzmann and Koettl 2015; Holzmann 2015c).

The intellectually innovating and operationally relevant and client-oriented work by the Social Protection and Labor Sector and its staff, which was recognized by two World Bank internal (but independent) evaluation bodies: in 2003, this sector was the only one to receive a "highly satisfactory" rating among 16 sectors, an outstanding rank retained in 2011 and shared with only two other World Bank sectors.

Since retiring from the World Bank in 2011 and returning to Alpine Austria, Holzmann has held the chair for Old-Age Financial Protection at the University of Malaya (Kuala Lumpur) (2012–2015) and continues to serve the University’s Social Security Research Centre in an honorary position. His impact includes: initiation of and work on a database of 30,000 contributors to the Employees Provident Fund – Malaysia’s central provident fund ‒ that will soon be available to researchers, the first of its kind in Asia; and a think piece on issues and a reform vision for the Employees Provident Fund (Holzmann 2014a). Since 2012 he has held an honorary position at CEPAR – the Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research – at the University of New South Wales. In this capacity he initiated a joint CEPAR-CESifo project on a largely under-researched topic, namely taxation of public and private pensions in general and taxation of internationally portable pensions in particular. Two successful workshops in Sydney (2014) and Munich (2015) offer the material for a book under preparation. With his initiated work on the taxation of internationally portable pensions, Holzmann hopes to attract the attention of economists to offer conceptual guidance for policy makers in the design and reform of income taxes and the rethinking of double taxation treaties (Holzmann 2015a).

Personal

Since 2011, Holzmann has lived with his wife Chantale in a mountain village of Styria in the Austrian Alps. Chantale is a former master teacher of English and French who, during their stay in Washington, D.C., served as president and senior advisor to the World Bank Family Network, an organization serving over 3,500 World Bank Group (WBG) families. She was central to the expansion and strengthening of supportive and community-building services for the families of WBG staff. She was also pivotal in raising awareness of and establishing effective structures at the WBG for dealing with domestic abuse. Holzmann and his wife have two married children and four grandchildren.

References

Robert Holzmann Wikipedia

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