Suchergebnisse

Sustainable and adequate old age pensions in ageing societies have become a major topic on the political agenda. This book describes the shift from public to private pensions and explains the differences across ten European countries.

This article, based on two books (2008, forthcoming), sets out principles for pension design: pension systems have multiple objectives, analysis should consider the pension system as a whole, analysis should be in a second-best context, different systems share risks differently and have different effects by generation and by gender. The article considers policy implications: there is no single best pension design; earlier retirement does not reduce unemployment; unsustainable pension promises should be addressed directly; adding funding in a PAYG mandatory system may or may not be welfare improving; and implementation matters design should not exceeds a country's capacity to implement.

Pension benefit guarantee policies have been introduced in several countries to protect private pension plan members from the loss of income that would occur if a plan was underfunded when the sponsoring firm terminates a plan. Most of these public insurance schemes face financial difficulty and consequently policy reforms are being discussed or implemented. Economic theory suggests that such schemes will face moral hazard and adverse selection problems. In this note we test a specific theoretical prediction: insured plans will invest more heavily in risky assets. Our test exploits differences in insurance arrangements across Canadian jurisdictions. We find that insured plans invest about 5 percent more in equities than do similar plans without benefit guarantees.

This paper analyzes various reform options for Japan's public pension in light of large fiscal consolidation needs of the country. The most attractive option is to increase the pension eligibility age in line with high and rising life expectancy. This would have a positive effect on long-run economic growth and would be relatively fair in sharing the burden of fiscal adjustment between younger and older generations. Other attractive options include better targeting by "clawing back" a small portion of pension benefits from wealthy retirees, reducing preferential tax treatment of pension benefit incomes, and collecting contributions from dependent spouses of employees, who are currently eligible for pension benefits even though they make no contributions. These options, if implemented concurrently, could reduce the government annual subsidy and the government deficit by up to 1¼ percent of GDP by 2020.

The issue of unfunded public pension systems has moved to the centre of public debate all over the world. Unfortunately, a large part of the discussions have remained on a qualitative level. This book seeks to address this by providing detailed knowledge on modelling pension systems.