June 2023

Sustainability of pension schemes. Building a smooth automatic balance mechanism with an application to the US social security

By Frédéric Gannon, Florence Legros & Vincent Touzé We build a “smooth” automatic balancing mecanism (S-ABM) which would result from an optimal tradeoff between increasing the receipts and reducing the expenditures of a pension scheme. The S-ABM obtains from minimizing a sum of discounted quadratic loss function under the constraint of an intertemporal budget balance. One advantage of this model of “optimal” adjustment is its ability to analyse various configurations in terms of ABMs by controlling the adjustment pace. Notably,...

May 2023

A zoom into Asia’s pension reform journey: different perspectives of a multi-pillar approach

By Calvin Chiu & Elvin Tharm Pension reform in Asia is progressing as the region faces numerous challenges: ageing populations, rising life expectancy and the erosion of traditional family and community support for the elderly. While the traditional state-provided pension may provide one potential source of retirement income, Manulife Investment Management believes that a comprehensive multi-pillar approach, such as that outlined by the World Bank, should be the best way forward. In this initial paper of a new series on...

Bringing Back the State: Understanding Varieties of Pension Re-reforms in Latin America

By Leandro N.Carrera & Marina Angelaki Pension policy is a highly political issue across Latin America. Since the mid-2000s, several countries have re-reformed their pension systems with a general trend toward more state involvement, yet with significant variation. This article contends that policy legacies and the institutional political setting are key to understanding such variation. Analyzing the cases of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, this article shows that where a weak legacy, characterized by low coverage and savings rates, a weakly...

The Future of AI and Older Adults

By Laurie M. Orlov  Advances in AI got the full attention of the technology industry, which is undergoing its first major disruption since the arrival of smart speakers and voice in 2014. Multiple industries see compelling opportunities, including healthcare providers, senior living, customer service providers, training and remote monitoring service offerings. Government organizations are investing in AI and aging startups and programs. Although there are a number of barriers to adoption, in the not-so-distant future, machine learning, chatbots, and AI in the home...

Workplace sidecar saving in action

By Annick Kuipers, Jo Phillips, Will Sandbrook & Emma Stockdale As a concept, sidecar saving is designed to work with human cognitive and behavioural biases, by sequencing people’s saving to boost their financial resilience – by first, in the short term, building liquid savings, and then, for retirement, increasing contributions to pension saving. We knew immediately that this idea had the potential to address two of the biggest financial challenges for low- to moderateincome households in the UK: 1) not...

“Milliman’s Pension Funding Index. May 2023”

By Milliman The funded status of the nation’s 100 largest corporate defined benefit pension plans decreased by $7 billion during April, as measured by the Milliman 100 Pension Funding Index (PFI). A decrease in the benchmark corporate bond interest rates used to value pension liabilities led to an increase in these liabilities of $10 billion for the month. As of April 30, the funded ratio fell to 99.5%, from 100.1% at the end of March. April saw the funding surplus...

Developments in the Economics of Aging (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report)

By David A. Wise  The number of Americans eligible to receive Social Security benefits will increase from forty-five million to nearly eighty million in the next twenty years. Retirement systems must therefore adapt to meet the demands of the largest aging population in our nation’s history. In Developments in the Economics of Aging, David A. Wise and a distinguished group of analysts examine the economic issues that will confront policy makers as they seek to design policies to protect the...

International Comparison of Pension Systems: An Investigation from Consumers’ Viewpoint

By Hongmu Lee, Gianni Nicolini & Man Cho  A secure and adequate pension system is central to establishing a welfare state. Given that, this book aims to document a set of diverse Public policy issues on the financial consumers standpoint that are observed in different countries. In this introductory chapter, we attempt to summarize those policy issues that emerged from the survey of the countries included with respect to each of the three dimensions- adequacy, coverage, and sustainability.   Book "here"

April 2023

Social protection and response to covid-19 in Latin America and the Caribbean: Innovations in registration and payment systems

By Nurth Palomo, Luis Vargas Faulbaum, Anna Carolina Machado, Camila Rolon and Fábio Veras Soares, Monica Rubio, Florencia Alejandre & Gerardo Escaroz The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the foundations of the economy and provoked devastating social effects in all the countries in the world, being Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) one of the most affected regions. As of mid-March 2021, there were 37 million reported cases in the region and a staggering 1,275,567 deaths, equivalent to...

PensionBee. Annual Report and Financial Statements 2022

By PensionBee PensionBee is a leading online pension provider in the UK, with a mission to make pensions simple, so that everyone can look forward to a happy retirement. We are a direct-to-consumer financial technology company with approximately 183,000 Invested Customers and £3.0bn of Assets under Administration (‘AUA’) as at 31 December 2022 (2021: 117,000 Invested Customers and  £2.6bn of AUA). We deliver a leading customer proposition to pension holders in the UK defined contribution pensions market, catering for the mass...