This volume presents one of the pressing policy issues of the moment: the privatization of social security. While social security encounters enormous fiscal pressure in the face of an ageing population, there has been relatively little published on the fundamentals of essential reform through privatization. The text fills this void by studying retirement benefits in systems based on individual saving in funded accounts. It begins with an introductory paper that argues for reform by overviewing the economic effects of social security and the system's current dire situation. The next chapters investigate how five different countries - Argentina, Australia, Chile, Great Britain, and Mexico - have experienced privatization of their social security systems. The final five papers consider the economics of a privatized social security system in the United States.