Pension and Sustainability: The Case of Employee Capital Plans in Poland

• Janina Petelczyc ^[1]
  1. [1] Warsaw School of Economics

     Warsaw School of Economics

     Warszawa, Polonia

     
• Localización: Sustainability and the Insurance Market: Trends and Challenges / coord. por Juan Bataller Grau, Marcin Kawiński, Pierpaolo Marano, 2025, ISBN 978-3-031-72185-4, págs. 247-261
• Idioma: español
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• Resumen

  • The future of pensioners depends not only on the level of benefits they receive but also on climate conditions. Financial institutions, including insurance and pension funds, have the potential to significantly impact the mitigation or acceleration of anthropogenic climate change through their investment policies (Monasterolo, Ann Rev Resour Econ 12:299–320, 2020; Shrivastava et al., Organ Environ 32:26–40, 2019). It is, therefore, important to ensure that savings in capital pension funds do not finance a future that will be more difficult to live in. While ethical funds in Poland are relatively well developed in the region, they still lag behind those in Western Europe (Adamska et al., La Revue d’études comparatives Est-Ouest (RECEO) 3:7–43, 2016). As such, this chapter focuses on the Polish supplementary pension market, specifically Employee Capital Plans, viewed through the lens of stakeholder theory. The aim is to answer questions about participant engagement in the sustainable investments of their pension funds, as well as the regulations governing the investment policy of Employee Capital Plans. In this chapter, we perform a statistical analysis of the responses regarding the perception of climate change and sustainable investments from a representative sample of Polish individual investors, including members of Employee Capital Plans. We compare the results of this analysis with the legal study of the institutional framework. The analyses have shown that Employee Capital Plans participants in Poland are aware of climate change and are ready for pro-climate investments, but only if they bring the same profits as traditional investments. At the same time, they do not have much influence on the investment policy of the funds, which not only do not treat participants as stakeholders but also have quite specific investment policy guidelines that currently reduce the possibilities of investing in a sustainable manner.