By Alfredo Merlet Between January and September 2026, Fund E, the most conservative of Chile’s five mandatory pension fund types, lost about ten per cent in real terms, its second-worst result on record, while the funds’ positions in foreign interest-rate derivatives swung to a reported valuation loss of about US$7.7 billion. This article asks why […]

By Yaodi Yong, Jinggong Zhang & Xiaobai Zhu In response to demographic shifts such as declining fertility rates and increasing life expectancy, many countries are raising the full retirement age (FRA). This paper develops a novel optimization framework for designing FRA increase schedules, explicitly balancing the minimization of aggregate welfare loss across affected generations with […]

By Stephanie Neal & Laurens Swinkels Standard analyses of retirement adequacy focus on financial metrics such as contribution rates and replacement ratios, while climate scenario studies typically emphasize broad macroeconomic outcomes. Neither approach, however, directly addresses what matters most to individuals: the quality of life in retirement. Retirement security under climate change is inherently multidimensional, […]

More than 2.8 billion people live in countries and territories where adults age 65 and older outnumber children under age 15, according to PRB’s 2026 World Population Data Sheet and Data Explorer. Low fertility, a major driver of population aging, extends much further. Over 70 percent of the world’s population lives in 121 countries and […]

China’s efforts to boost contributions to its welfare system have drawn a backlash on social media, with users demanding better jobs and higher wages first, highlighting the challenges Beijing faces ​as it takes steps to restructure its export-reliant economy. The plans aim to expand participation in social insurance schemes, including pensions and medical ‌insurance, and […]

A new ranking of 55 retirement income systems reveals how Europe’s pension systems compare, with concerns over the long-term sustainability of benefits in some of the continent’s largest economies. The Netherlands offers the best pension system in the world, according to the Marsh CFA Institute Global Pension Index (MCGPI). The top-ranking country received a score […]

People are living longer nowadays and it could affect how they plan for retirement. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the average life expectancy at birth in 2024 was 76.5 years for males, 81.4 years for females, and 79 years for both sexes. But these averages don’t tell the whole story. […]