The World Bank Pension Reform Primeraims to provide a comprehensive toolkit for policy makers ondesigning and implementing pension reform. It is based oncontinuously updated information from countries that haveintroduced reforms emphasizing the role of privately-managedindividual retirement accounts. Their experience offers anumber of useful lessons for policy makers elsewhere. TheBank set out a conceptual framework for fundamental pensionreform in "Averting the Old Age Crisis: Policies toProtect the Old and Promote Growth". This study,published in 1994, helped shape the global debate about theimpact of population ageing on pension systems. The PensionReform Primer builds on this pioneering work and on theexperience of the Bank, and other internationalinstitutions. It focuses on practical questions.