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March 2025

The 2023 Latin America report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: the imperative for health-centred climate-resilient development

By Stella M. Hartinger, Yasna K. Palmeiro-Silva, Camila Llerena-Cayo, Luciana Blanco-Villafuerte, Luis E. Escobar, Avriel Diaz, Juliana Helo Sarmiento, Andrés G. Lescano, Oscar Melo, David Rojas-Rueda, Bruno Takahashi, Max Callaghan, Francisco Chesini, Shouro Dasgupta, Carolina Gil Posse, Nelson Gouveia, Aline Martins de Carvalho, Zaray Miranda-Chacón, Nahid Mohajeri, Chrissie Pantoja, Elizabeth J. Z. Robinson, Maria Fernanda Salas, Raquel Santiago, Enzo Sauma, Mauricio Santos-Vega, Daniel Scamman, Milena Sergeeva, Tatiana Souza de Camargo, Cecilia Sorensen, Juan D. Umaña, Marisol Yglesias-González, Maria Walawender,...

February 2025

Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World: The Effects of Reforms on Retirement Behavior

By Axel Börsch-Supan & Courtney Coile Employment among older men and women has increased dramatically in recent years, reversing a downward trend in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World examines how changing retirement incentives have reshaped labor force participation trends among older workers. The chapters feature country-specific analyses for Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They find that while there is significant heterogeneity...

January 2025

Pensionomics 2025: Measuring the Economic Impact of Defined Benefit Pension Expenditures

By Dan Doonan & Iliana Boivie Pensionomics 2025: Measuring the Economic Impact of Defined Benefit Pension Expenditures finds pension spending powered by U.S. private and public sector defined benefit pensions contributed significantly to the economy. In 2022, retiree spending of public and private sector pension benefits generated $1.5 trillion in total economic output, supporting 7.1 million jobs across the nation. In addition to its impact on employment and economic activity, pension spending bolstered public finances in 2022, adding $224.3 billion in...

Retirement Consumption and Pension Design

By Jonas Kolsrud, Camille Landais, Daniel Reck & Johannes Spinnewijn This paper analyzes consumption to evaluate the distributional effects of pension reforms. Using Swedish administrative data, we show that on average workers who retire earlier consume less while retired and experience larger drops in consumption around retirement. Interpreted via a theoretical model, these findings imply that reforms incentivizing later retirement incur a substantial consumption-smoothing cost. Turning to other features of pension policy, we find that reforms that redistribute based on...

Retirees Relocate for Income Tax Exemptions

By Linda Gorman In 2013, the Portuguese government offered foreign retirees relocating to Portugal a 10-year tax exemption on their foreign-source pension income, provided their country of origin had a tax treaty with Portugal. As the number of immigrant retirees grew, the amount of forgone income taxes grew, reaching €1.5 billion, or about 0.6 percent of GDP, by 2021. In that year, the tax exemption was replaced by a 10 percent rate. In 2024, the exemption was repealed. Source National Bureau...

December 2024

Retirement Incentives and Decisions across the Income Distribution: Evidence in Canada

By Kevin S. Milligan & Tammy Schirle We evaluate the retirement incentives embedded in Canada’s retirement income system with attention to where individuals are located in the income distribution. We find that larger social security benefits are available to individuals with lower earnings in their work history because of the benefit income tests, but those from the top of the income distribution tend to enjoy longer lives over which they may receive benefits. Overall, we see greater Social Security Wealth...

OECD Pensions Outlook 2024: Improving Asset-backed Pensions for Better Retirement Outcomes and More Resilient Pension Systems

By Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Over the past two decades, asset-backed pensions have become a key pillar of retirement systems, with assets more than tripling to over USD 56 trillion in 2023. These pensions diversify resources for financing retirement and complement pay-as-you-go systems, enhancing resilience to economic shocks and demographic challenges. Their robust design, regulation, and supervision are important for delivering strong retirement outcomes. The 2024 OECD Pensions Outlook provides a valuable resource for policymakers, regulators, and stakeholders, providing comprehensive analysis...

November 2024

Megatrends and the Future of Social Protection

By Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Ageing populations, changing labour markets, and climate change are affecting economies and societies across OECD countries. What challenges do these “megatrends” pose for social protection systems? What are the implications of these trends for the coverage, the effectiveness, and – critically – the funding of social protection today and tomorrow? With an eye towards informing future reforms, this report presents a broad stocktaking of population ageing, changing patterns of labour supply, new and emerging...

Financial Inclusion and the Informal Sector

By Noha Emara, Freddy Cama & Mohamed Trabelsi This paper explores the relationship between the informal sector and financial inclusion for a sample of 186 countries across the period 2004-2018 and using various methods of estimations—ordinary least squares, instrumental variables, fixed effects, and general method of moments. The results show financial inclusion significantly reduces the size of the shadow economy with all indicators of access and usage of financial services. The result is also robust when considering the income level,...

Pension Liquidity Risk

By Kristy Jansen, Sven Klingler, Angelo Ranaldo & Patty Duijm Pension funds rely on interest rate swaps to hedge the interest rate risk arising from their liabilities. Analyzing unique data on Dutch pension funds, we show that this hedging behavior exposes pension funds to liquidity risk due to margin calls, which can be as large as 15% of their total assets. Our analysis uncovers three key findings: (i) pension funds with tighter regulatory constraints use swaps more aggressively; (ii) in...