Portability Corridor Study

Ulrich Becker with Axel Börsch-Supan Portability is defined as the ability to preserve, maintain and transfer vested social security rights or rights in the process of being vested, independent of profession, nationality and country of residency. Bilateral or multilateral social security agreements usually include provisions on nondiscrimination between nationals and migrants with respect to social security and rules of cooperation between the social security institutions of the signatory countries. This project will answer the following questions: How effective is the process of coordination and what are the key issues? What is the share of processed requests compared to potentially eligible beneficiaries? What is the magnitude of portability loss prevented by the agreements? How do migrants evaluate the redemption of benefits? Do they have sufficient knowledge about the agreements? What is known about migrants who claim benefits? Filling these knowledge gaps requires comprehensive and well results framework and in depth study of existing agreements on different levels, i.e. the legal, the administrative and the migrant level. To do so, MPISOC participates, together with the World Bank, in a set of corridor studies between countries of long established migration flows. Appropriate corridors need to be characterized by migration flows that have followed this corridor traditionally and over many years, and by the presence of elaborate social security agreements. Specifically, the project involves migration from Turkey to Germany and Austria. The two bilateral social security agreements with Turkey may bring substantial experiences, as they existed for many years in a migration intensive corridor. The pool of migrants is likely to include young migrants as well as migrants who are about to or have retired and who intend to move back to Turkey. In addition, the agreement with Austria includes health benefits, a case that is rare and of great relevance to other countries. This project has been successfully completed with a book edited by Robert Holzmann and associates from the Worldbank.