September 2024

Pension Coverage and Informal Sector Workers: International Experiences

By Yu-Wei Hu & Fiona Stewart  Pension reform around the world in recent decades has focused mainly on the formal sector. Consequently, many of those working in the informal sector have been left out of structured pension arrangements, particularly in developing countries – a serious problem given this group are often low income earners, vulnerable to economic volatility and change. However, since the turn of the millennium, efforts in a range of countries have increasingly highlighted improving pension coverage for...

Pension scheme assets – how they are invested and how and why they change over time

By The Pensions Policy Intitute We know both ‘quite a lot’ and ‘not enough’ about the assets that back current and future retirement incomes. Quite a lot because there are several sources of data that map pension fund assets and the way in which they are invested. Not enough because there are gaps in our knowledge and a multiplicity of data sets that classify assets in slightly different ways. The timing of different reports can also create difficulty mapping assets...

Revisiting Sample Bias in the Uk’s Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, with Implications for Estimates of Low Pay and the Bite of the National Living Wage

By John Forth, Alex Bryson,Van Phan, Felix Ritchie, Carl Singleton, Lucy Stokes & Damian Whittard The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) is based on an annual one per cent sample of employee jobs and provides many of the UK's official earnings statistics. These statistics are generated using official weights designed to make the achieved sample in each year representative of the population of employee jobs in Britain by gender, age, occupation, and region. However, we find that jobs...

Self-Control Preferences and Pension Means Testing

By Daniel Wheadon, Gonzalo Castex, George Kudrna & Alan D. Woodland We investigate the effects of self-control preferences on household life cycle decisions, macroeconomic outcomes, and the roles they play in determining optimal means testing of public old-age pensions. To that end, we develop a stochastic overlapping generations model with heterogeneous households that have Gul-Pesendorfer self-control preferences. First, we show that in economies with higher self-control costs lifetime savings diminish, while labor supply and retirement are postponed to later ages....

The Future of Retirement Security An International Comparison through the Lens of Adequacy, Sustainability, Equity and Plan Design

By Surya Kolluri, Catherine Reilly & David P. Richardson Countries around the world are considering and implementing reforms to their retirement systems for a variety of reasons, including increasing demographic and economic pressures. A key demographic driver is human longevity. For example, the average retiree can expect to spend about two decades in retirement, roughly double the time from 50 years ago. In the United States, life expectancy has risen by 17 years since the Social Security program debuted nearly...

Edad, trabajo y salud ocupacional: retos y oportunidades para los trabajadores y las organizaciones en Iberoamérica

Por Carlos María Alcover de la Hera El envejecimiento de la fuerza de trabajo debido a los cambios sociodemográficos globales plantea un conjunto de retos y de oportunidades cuya gestión es compleja y cuyos resultados pueden traer consigo consecuencias muy diversas para las personas y para las organizaciones. El principal objetivo de este artículo es analizar los más importantes identificados por la investigación internacional aplicados al contexto iberoamericano. Tras una contextualización de esos cambios sociodemográficos y sus impactos en el...

El Sistema Nacional de Pensiones y la política de endeudamiento en el Perú: financiamiento de las reformas paramétricas en crisis pandémica

Por Luis Alberto Quintana García  En el presente trabajo se analiza el problema del financiamiento de las reformas paramétricas realizadas al Sistema Nacional de Pensiones (SNP) del Perú, en el periodo de la pandemia, para lo cual, se inicia con un estudio sobre el estado en el que se encuentra el SNP y cómo llega al contexto de la pandemia; posteriormente, se examina el proceso de implementación delas reformas paramétricas, a través de la revisión crítica del proceso de promulgación...

Optimising Bangladesh’s Universal Pension Framework: From Lessons to Actions

By Samiha Chowdhury Social protection for the elderly, in the form of the Old-age Allowance (OAA) Programme, has been operational in Bangladesh since 1998, offering monthly financial support to senior citizens from poor and vulnerable households. As of FY24, the programme has approximately 5.8 million elderly people as beneficiaries, each receiving Tk.600 per month distributed on a quarterly basis. Apart from this, retirement benefits for the government employees and their families can also be considered a social protection programme for...

The Rise of Alternatives

By Juliane Begenau, Pauline Liang & Emil Siriwardane Since the 2000s, U.S. public pensions have shifted their risky investments towards alternative assets like private equity and hedge funds, some more aggressively than others. We explore several explanations for these cross-sectional trends, focusing on those implied by the mean-variance models used by most pensions. Our evidence suggests that the rise of alternatives has been fueled by an increase in their perceived risk-adjusted returns relative to public equities. Pension beliefs are shaped...

When the Abundance Ends: Economic Transformation, Population Aging, and Shrinking Lifecycle Surplus in China

By Feng Wang, Ke Shen & Yong Cai China’s age of abundance, driven by rapid increases in labor income and a favorable population age profile, led to a sizable surplus at the society level. Using the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) approach, this study updates results published in this journal a decade ago. It traces changes in labor income and consumption patterns in China in the 2010s, and compares them with those in the decade prior. Our results report significant shifts...