José Piñera
José Piñera | |
|---|---|
| Labour and Social Forecast Minister | |
| In office 26 December 1978 – 29 December 1980 | |
| President | Augusto Pinochet |
| Preceded by | Vasco Costa |
| Succeeded by | Miguel Kast |
| Mining Minister | |
| In office 29 December 1980 – 4 December 1981 | |
| President | Augusto Pinochet |
| Preceded by | Carlos Quiñones |
| Succeeded by | Hernán Felipe Errazuriz |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 6 October 1948 Santiago, Chile |
| Political party | Independent |
| Residence(s) | Santiago, Chile |
| Education | Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (BA) Harvard University (MA, PhD) |
José Piñera Echenique (born 6 October 1948) is a Chilean economist, one of the famous Chicago Boys, who served as minister of Labor and Social Security, and of Mining, in the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. He is the architect of Chile's private pension system based on personal retirement accounts. Piñera has been called "the world's foremost advocate of privatizing public pension systems" as well as "the Pension Reform Pied Piper" (by the Wall Street Journal). He is now Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, President of the International Center for Pension Reform based in Santiago, Senior Fellow at the Italian libertarian think tank Istituto Bruno Leoni, and member of the advisory board of the Vienna-based Educational Initiative for Central and Eastern Europe. He has a master's degree and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. Piñera is a board member in Chile and an active supporter of SOS Children's Villages, the largest orphan and abandoned children's charity in the world.
He is the elder brother of former president Sebastián Piñera with whom he had a longstanding conflict.