Survivorship Pensions in the Middle East and North Africa Region: Current Situation and Innovative Options for Reforms Najat El Mekkaoui de Freitas 1 & Salah-Eddine Benjelloun May 2010 Preliminary version The purpose of the survivor's pension is to create rights for young and old age dependants. In the case of developed countries, the system deals essentially with the spouse survival. In the case of MENA countries, the survivor’s pensions scheme provides a wider perspective of coverage and is extended to protect children, brothers, sisters, dependant parents and grand-parents according to specific criteria. Two objectives of survivor's pensions can be distinguished. On the one hand, the survivor's pensions aim at providing a minimum of resources when the widow(er) could not acquire any other sources of income. In this case, the widow survivor's pension is provided to the most modest households in order to help them from plunging in extreme poverty. This context prevails widely in MENA countries, where poverty is high and the level of dependancy is also prominent. On the other hand, a second perspective considers the survivor's pensions as a pension right to the widow (er) with the aim of maintaining her/his former standard of living. Developed countries are particularly concerned by this environment. This paper propose an analysis of the impact of pension reforms, particurlarly, of the survirvorship pensions reforms on the individual situations of retirees. The analysis focuses on Moroccan pension system and will consider a representative sample of members of the main schemes in Morocco. The paper is organized as follows. In the first section, we present the current system in MENA countries (coverage, conditions for eligibility and benefits levels); other developed and developing countries are also reviewed. In the next section, we present the costs and the current situation and options for reforms in Morocco. I. Current systems in MENA and an overview of systems around the world This section presents an overview of the survivor’s pension programs across a sample of MENA countries. A selection of other developing and developed countries is also reviewed to provide some kind of benchmarking or outlook on the type of systems and reforms followed by other countries. The selected MENA countries for this study are 1 Université paris-Dauphine, E-mail : najat.el-mekkaoui@dauphine.fr