Martin Potůček conceives the old-age pension as of two-components made up of a fixed amount paid to all and one that is dependent on the number of years worked and the working income received. The law is built on the principle of substantial redistribution of accumulated finances towards persons with a lower level of earnings. Old-age pensions for persons with higher working incomes are affected by a regressively acting calculation formula. Since 1995 there has been a public discussion about the reform of the whole concept of the old-age pension system. It was initiated by experts from international financial institutions, namely the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, who strongly recommended that the country opt for compulsory private co-insurance. This new type of old-age insurance would complement the pay-as-you-go public scheme that would gradually lose its importance in the total amount of redistributed resources. It was argued that this change would be inevitable due to demographic trends(ageing of the population) and the demand for investment in the national economy that would be satisfied by the newly established and privately run for-profit pension funds. In contrast to Poland, Hungary, and recently also Slovakia, who had introduced this model, the Czech Republic resisted the pressure. There were two main factors that could explain this significant difference:  The country was not in as deep a fiscal crisis as other Central and Eastern European countries and was less dependent on loans provided by these organisations.  There were strong political opponents of this idea, namely the consecutive Social Democrat-led governments and the trade unions that stressed the risks of such a reform due to the fragility of financial markets and institutions and the huge demand for additional financial inputs over a couple of decades within introducing such a reform. One of the stimuli for the establishment and operation of the cross-party task force for pension reform in 2004-2005 was, once again, the EU green paper on “Confronting demographic change: a new solidarity between the generations”. The government has established this force in order to simulate the consequences of alternative pension reform options and thus contribute to rational discussion of the representatives of different ideological views. Social policy agenda No comprehensive national policy inspired by the new EU Social Agenda launched in the beginning of 2005 has been developed. Nevertheless, there is 142