It took three presidents, four finance ministers, and countless setbacks, but Brazil finally completed an overhaul of its pension system—one of the world’s most generous and a perennial drain on government finances. The bill, which is at the core of President Jair Bolsonaro’s economic agenda, was approved by the Senate on Oct. 23 after months of debates.

The legislation hasn’t supplied the confidence boost that many analysts had anticipated, however. Growth remains stalled, foreign investors are mostly on the sidelines, and the implementation of the rest of the government’s economic agenda is unclear. “The pension reform was a change to avoid Brazil going bankrupt,” says Mario Mesquita, chief economist at Itau Unibanco Holding SA. “Reforms to get Brazil to grow, like the tax overhaul, are more complicated.”

Pension reform has been debated, promised, and protested for years. Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2003 succeeded in cutting the pension deficit, but the legislation didn’t go far enough in attacking the root causes of the shortfall. Dilma Rousseff didn’t get around to tackling the issue before she was impeached in 2016. Her replacement, Michel Temer, had gathered just about enough support for his own bill when Joesley Batista, the owner of meat-processing giant JBS SA, taped the president allegedly endorsing the payment of a bribe to a lawmaker.

Investors, who’d already priced in approval of the measure, have turned their attention to the rest of the government’s agenda. While there’s plenty to be done, from privatizing dozens of state-run companies to revamping a complicated tax system and cutting red tape, some fear momentum has dissipated. “We’re a little anxious about the pace of things in Congress,” says Mariana Guarino, a money manager at Truxt Investimentos in Rio de Janeiro. “Things are moving much more slowly than we expected.” That’s a concern, because Brazil’s economy desperately needs a jump-start. The country has been slow to rebound from a deep recession in 2015-16. This year, even with record-low interest rates and no major internal or external shocks, growth will be only 0.9％, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists.

According to Mario Mesquita, what does this overhaul mean?