September 2019
13Sep

Reforming Social Security: The Challenge of Income Inequality

By David W. Rasmussen Objective: This article examines the role Social Security plays in alleviating poverty among retirees in the context of threats to its solvency. Method: Examining long-term employment trends, declining access to defined benefit pensions and saving behavior can determine if in the more future Social Security beneficiaries are likely to be poor. Results: Labor market trends driven by technical change, global competition and increasing demand for services indicate that more future retirees will have lower life-time...

September 13, 2019
Adequacy, Articles, Regulation, , ,
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11Sep

Property v Pension – What’s The Best Retirement Plan?

Choosing how to grow your money for a comfortable retirement is a vexing question for many investors – and there doesn’t seem to be a correct answer. Picking the right investment horse to back is tricky and can have lifestyle changing repercussions when you reach retirement age. The favourites are property and pensions, but which one, if either, is best for you? Independent money mag Which? has looked at both and concludes striking a balance between the two rather...

September 11, 2019
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06Sep

Twenty Years of Wage Inequality in Latin America

By Julián Messina, Joana Silva This paper documents an inverse U-shape in the evolution of wage inequality in Latin America since 1995, with a sharp reduction starting in 2002. The Gini coefficient of wages increased from 42 to 44 between 1995 and 2002 and declined to 39 by 2015. Between 2002 and 2015, the 90/10 log hourly earnings ratio decreased by 26 percent. The decline since 2002 was characterized by rising wages across the board, but especially among those...

September 6, 2019
Adequacy, Articles, Labor Market, , ,
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05Sep

Ageism is putting all our retirements at risk

Pensioner poverty, we are often led to believe, is a thing of the past. Apparently, the Baby Boomer generation has been so successful at defending its interests that the greedy old buggers are raking it in. It is claimed that we live in a ‘retirement aristocracy’. Pensioners spend their days jetting off on holiday or sauntering around the golf course. They are sitting pretty in their oversized, overpriced homes. Meanwhile, younger generations are said to be miserably stuck at...

September 5, 2019
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04Sep

Ecuadorian Retirees demand Payment of their Pensions

Dozens of retirees from the National Electricity Corporation (CNEL) today demanded that President Lenin Moreno's government pay their pensions through the Ecuadorian Social Security Institute (IESS). New demonstrators joined the pensioner's hunger strike in Rocafuerte Square, in the center of Guayaquil, about 267 kilometers from the capital, who are claiming that they have received incomplete pension payments for the past decade. In the opinion of several strikers, the IESS calculated the retirement pension based on the unified basic salary...

September 4, 2019
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August 2019
30Aug

Why is Inequality Higher Among the Old? Evidence from China

By Katja Hanewald, Ruo Jia, Zining Liu This paper studies income inequality in old age and its development over the life cycle. We develop a theoretical framework and a new empirical method to show that income is more unequally distributed in old age than in working age. We combine the regression-based inequality decomposition method and the three-step mediating effect test to analyze the transmission of income inequality from initial socioeconomic differences to income inequality in old age. Our study...

August 30, 2019
Adequacy, Aging, Articles, Pension design, , , , ,
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16Aug

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

By Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics and Director Poverty Action Lab Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo Two practical visionaries upend the most common assumptions about how economics works in this gripping and disruptive portrait of how poor people actually live. Why do the poor borrow to save? Why do they miss out on free life-saving immunizations, but pay for unnecessary drugs? In Poor Economics, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two award-winning MIT professors, answer these questions based...

August 16, 2019
Books, Investing, Savings, System Sustainability, ,
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16Aug

Performance and Challenges of the Income Protection System for Older People in Ecuador

By Ignacio Raul Apella The purpose of this work is to analyze the performance of the Ecuadorian pension system, its challenges, and available policy options. Therefore, the study analyzes coverage, financing sufficiency, and sustainability indicators that were created based on information from the Encuesta Nacional de Empleo, Desempleo y Subempleo (National Employment, Unemployment and Underemployment Survey) that was carried out over 2003-16. Likewise, actuarial simulations are made by using the World Bank pension reform options simulation toolkit. The findings...

August 16, 2019
Aging, Articles, System Sustainability, , ,
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16Aug

Income Inequality and Government Transfers in Mexico

 By Frederic Lambert, Hyunmin Park We analyze microdata from Mexico's survey on household income and expenditures (ENIGH) to study the evolution of income inequality in Mexico over 2004-16, identify its sources, and investigate how it was affected by government social policy. We find evidence of only a small decline in inequality over this period. The observed decline may be attributed to government transfers, notably targeted cash transfers (Prospera) and non-contributory pensions. In 2016, those two programs accounted for more...

August 16, 2019
Articles, Regulation, Slider-Left, , , , , ,
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09Aug

Unbelievable: ERISA’s Broken Promise

By Peter J. Wiedenbeck A central but generally neglected objective of federal regulation of pension and welfare benefit plans was to provide workers with accessible and reliable information on which to base their career and financial planning, thereby improving overall economic efficiency. But few workers are equipped with the skills needed to evaluate the costs and benefits of complex retirement saving or health care programs. For that reason ERISA, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, requires disclosure...

August 9, 2019
Adequacy, Articles, Pension design, Regulation,
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