Developing a framework for pension value preservation in hyper-inflationary economies: insurance and pensions commission regulation (2009-2024)

Abstract

This study evaluates the regulatory interventions implemented by the Insurance and Pensions Commission of Zimbabwe (IPEC) to preserve pension value during the currency volatility of 2009 to 2024 and develops a framework for pension value preservation in hyper-inflationary economies. Chapter One establishes the problem: Zimbabwean pensioners lost the greater part of their purchasing power across successive monetary crises, yet no study had assessed, rather than merely described, the effectiveness of IPEC’s responses. Four objectives guided the inquiry: to document IPEC’s interventions across the period; to evaluate their effectiveness in protecting pensioners’ purchasing power; to identify the institutional, legal, informational, and technical barriers that constrained implementation; and to propose an evidence-based preservation framework. Chapter Two reviews the literature on pension value preservation, inflation and currency instability, and regulatory effectiveness. It identifies a normal conditions bias in existing scholarship, which assumes gradual erosion within a functioning monetary order, and draws on Hanke and Kwok’s monetary theory and Llewellyn’s conditions for regulatory effectiveness. The review is integrated through institutional theory, framework-adequacy theory, and crisis-management theory, and exposes the gap this study addresses: the absence of multi-stakeholder evidence, especially the pensioner voice. Chapter Three sets out the methodology. Adopting an interpretivist paradigm, the study employed a qualitative single-case design centred on IPEC, with four embedded units of analysis representing trustees, IPEC officials, actuarial professionals, and pensioners. Using purposive and snowball sampling to data saturation, evidence was gathered from fifty-two participants through semi-structured interviews, systematic document analysis, and focus group discussion. Methodological triangulation across these sources, together with the embedded multi-stakeholder design, secured credibility and supported analytical generalisation. Chapters Four and Five present the findings and conclusions. The study produced a taxonomy of thirty-seven interventions and traced a trajectory from design-adequate regulation under stable multi-currency conditions, through systemic effectiveness failure during the 2019 to 2023 depreciation (median purchasing-power losses estimated at 82 per cent), to an improving but individually contingent recovery. Effectiveness depended on legal-framework adequacy, institutional capacity, and the alignment between instrument design and monetary conditions; inadequate legal authority, not institutional negligence, was the binding constraint. The study concludes that framework scope is the decisive limitation; that foreign-currency denomination is the only economically sound preservation strategy under monetary collapse; and that institutionalised post-crisis review and statutory member communication are urgent, low-cost reforms. It contributes a Pension Value Preservation in Hyper-inflationary Economies (PVPHE) Framework for Zimbabwe and comparable jurisdictions exposed to currency instability. .