August 2017

Sistemas de Pensiones en America Latina y Mexico

Por Juana Isabel Vera Lopez A nivel mundial, los sistemas de pensiones se encuentran en crisis debido a que sus regimenes y beneficios consideraron una situacion distinta a la actual. Fenomenos como el envejecimiento poblacion, aumento de la esperanza de vida, el aumento del trabajo informal, subempleo, auto empleo, entre otros factores han agravado esta situacion. En Mexico, en 1995 y 2007 se reformaron las legislaciones del IMSS e ISSSTE siguiendo los parametros internacionales. En estas dos decadas transcurridas desde...

March 2017

Beyond the Privatisation and Re-Nationalisation of the Argentine Pension System: Coverage, Fragmentation, and Sustainability

By Fabio Bertranou & Luis Casanova (International Labour Organization);  Oscar Cetrángolo & Carlos Grushka (University of Buenos Aires) In the last decades, the pension system in Argentina has experienced important changes that included the introduction of an individual account defined-contribution component (or individual capitalisation) in 1994 and its subsequent reversal to a defined benefit pay-as-you-go pension scheme in 2008. After the 2001 crisis, the favourable fiscal position allowed the implementation of policies that reversed the decline in pension coverage to unprecedented...

February 2017

Pensions, Retirement, and the Disutility of Labor: Bunching in Brazil

By Benjamin Thompson (University of Michigan) Abstract:      Elderly workers in developing countries face certain frictions, such as credit constraints, in their retirement decisions that may not be as common among their counterparts in the developed world, and these concerns may lead workers to work more or less than their preferred number of years. In this study, I firstly use regression discontinuity methods to show that a large fraction of urban male heads of households in Brazil (roughly 45%)...

Workers' Knowledge of their Pension Coverage: A Reevaluation

By Martha Starr-McCluer & Annika Sundén Because employer-provided pensions represent an important source of income during retirement, accurate information on pension coverage would seem to be crucial for making sound decisions on retirement timing, saving and portfolio allocation. However, previous research suggests that workers’ knowledge of their pension provisions is often incomplete or incorrect. This paper re-examines workers’ knowledge of their pension coverage, using matched employer-employee data from the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances. We find that, while...

Workers’ Knowledge of their Pension Coverage: A Reevaluation

By Martha Starr-McCluer & Annika Sundén Because employer-provided pensions represent an important source of income during retirement, accurate information on pension coverage would seem to be crucial for making sound decisions on retirement timing, saving and portfolio allocation. However, previous research suggests that workers’ knowledge of their pension provisions is often incomplete or incorrect. This paper re-examines workers’ knowledge of their pension coverage, using matched employer-employee data from the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances. We find that, while...

Pension Coverage in Latin America: trends and determination

By Rafael Rofman & Maria Laura Oliveri This document presents an analysis of pension coverage trends in Latin America for the past decades. Its preparation involved the collection, revision, and processing of household surveys in over 18 countries in the region, spanning a period of almost 40 years in some cases. The main goal of this document is to offer comparable data on pension coverage among the economically active population and the elderly, considering the relevance of several demographic, social,...

International patterns of pension provision II: a worldwide overview of facts and figures

By Montserrat Pallares Miralles, Carolina Romero & Edward Whitehouse This paper presents and explains cross country data for mandatory publicly and privately managed pension systems around the world. This report is organized into three parts corresponding to three broad types of indicators. These indicators relate to: (i) the relevant contextual factors referred to here as environment; (ii) pension system design parameters; and (iii) indicators of performance. Part one of the report provides some information on the environment in which the...

Is Asia Prepared for an Aging Population?

By Peter Heller Many Asian countries (such as China, Singapore, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines) will experience a significant aging of their populations during the next several decades. This paper explores how these aging Asian countries are addressing and anticipating the challenges of an aging society. It suggests that Asia's preparedness for an aging population is decidedly mixed. While growth policies have been successful, much work is still needed in many countries to establish an adequate and...

Taxing Kenya’s M-Pesa Picks the Pockets of the Poor

By Liliana Rojas-Suarez Kenya has instituted a new tax that affects users of M-Pesa -- a widely popular phone-based money transfer service used by more than half of Kenya’s adult population. The new 10 percent excise duty on fees charged for money transfer services applies to mobile phone providers, banks, and other money transfer agencies. Operated by Safaricom, the largest mobile network operator in Kenya, M-Pesa accounts for the largest share of users of money transfer services. Users of M-Pesa...

The Role of Social Security in Overall Retirement Resources: A Distributional Perspective

By Alice Henriques & John Sabelhaus During recent decades, the US employer-sponsored retirement system has undergone a major shift from primarily defined benefit (DB)-type plans to primarily defined contribution (DC)-type plans. Furthermore, in the past decade, participation in employer retirement plans has fallen, particularly for younger and lower-income families. In light of this, there is growing concern that wealth accumulation through employer-provided pension plans is falling short, especially for the bottom half of the income distribution. However, focusing only on...