June 2018

25Jun

The Effects of Means-Tested, Noncontributory Pensions on Poverty and Well-Being: Evidence from the Chilean Pension Reforms

By Italo Garcia (RAND Corporation) & Andres Otero (Independent) Chile initiated in 1981 a privately managed, individual-account pension system that inspired similar reforms in many Latin American countries, and that has been considered as a possible model for Social Security in the United States. After 30 years in place, the Chilean pension system has been criticized for replicating existing inequalities in labor markets and increasing the risk of old-age poverty; for achieving lower levels of coverage; and for providing low...

June 25, 2018
Articles, Pension design, System Sustainability, , ,
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16Jun

Population Aging and the Possibility of a Middle-Income Trap in Asia

By Joonkyung Ha (Hanyang University - Ansan Campus) & Sang-Hyop Lee (University of Hawaii - Department of Economics) We present three conditions for a demography-driven middle-income trap and show that many economies in East, South, and Southeast Asia satisfy all of them. The conditions are (1) support ratio—the ratio of workers to consumers—matters for economic growth, (2) economic development accompanies more investment in human capital and lower fertility due to the quantity–quality trade-off, and (3) current low level of fertility...

June 16, 2018
Aging, Articles, , ,
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16Jun

The Effects of Means-Tested, Noncontributory Pensions on Poverty and Well-Being: Evidence from the Chilean Pension Reforms

By Italo Garcia (RAND Corporation) & Andres Otero (Independent) Chile initiated in 1981 a privately managed, individual-account pension system that inspired similar reforms in many Latin American countries, and that has been considered as a possible model for Social Security in the United States. After 30 years in place, the Chilean pension system has been criticized for replicating existing inequalities in labor markets and increasing the risk of old-age poverty; for achieving lower levels of coverage; and for providing low...

June 16, 2018
Articles, Pension design, Regulation, , , , ,
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10Jun

Inheritances and Inequality across and within Generations

By Andrew Hood & Robert Joyce Today’s elderly have much more wealth to bequeath than their predecessors, primarily as the result of rising homeownership rates and rising house prices. At the same time, today’s young adults will find it harder to accumulate wealth of their own than previous generations did, due to the sharp fall in homeownership, the dramatic decline of defined benefit pensions in the private sector and the stagnation in household incomes. Together, these trends mean inherited wealth is...

June 10, 2018
Aging, Books, Labor Market, Savings, ,
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04Jun

Flexible or Mandatory Retirement? Welfare Implications of Retirement Policies for a Population With Heterogeneous Health Conditions

By Zhenhua Feng (Tsinghua University - Institute of Economics), Jaimie W. Lien (The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) - Department of Decision Sciences & Managerial Economics) & Jie Zheng (Tsinghua University - School of Economics & Management) A flexible retirement policy has often been proposed as a solution to address the social dilemma of individuals in the population having different desired retirement ages. We analyze such a policy in an overlapping generations general equilibrium framework, where individuals differ in...

June 4, 2018
Articles, Labor Market, Regulation, , ,
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May 2018

27May

Long-Run Trends in the Economic Activity of Older People in the UK

By James W. Banks (Institute for Fiscal Studies; University of Manchester), Carl Emmerson (Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS)) & Gemma Tetlow (Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS)) We document employment rates of older men and women in the UK over the last forty years. In both cases growth in employment since the mid 1990s has been stronger than for younger age groups. On average, older men are still less likely to be in work than they were in the mid 1970s...

May 27, 2018
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, ,
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27May

Universal Social Protection Floors: Costing Estimates and Affordability in 57 Lower Income Countries

By Isabel Ortiz (United Nations - International Labour Organization (ILO); Initiative for Policy Dialogue), Fabio Duran (International Labour Organization (ILO)), Karuna Pal (International Labour Organization (ILO)), Christina Behrendt (International Labour Office) & Andres Acuña-Ulate (International Labour Organization (ILO)) This paper presents the results of costing universal social protection floors in 34 lower middle-income, and 23 low-income countries, consisting of: (i) allowances for all children and all orphans; (ii) maternity benefits for all women with newborns; (iii) benefits for all persons...

May 27, 2018
Articles, Labor Market, System Sustainability, ,
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