February 2022

Nigeria. Stakeholders advocate micro pension to secure financial future

The Pension Fund Operators Association of Nigeria have urged those in the informal sector to embrace micro pension as a means of securing their future financially. The Chief Executive Officer of the Association, Mr. Oguche Agudah made the call at the maiden Retreat and Unveiling of Magazine, THE PENSIONER for the Pension Correspondents Association of Nigeria in Abuja. Mr. Agudah said Contributory Pension Scheme should be embraced by all, because of its flexibility and safety of funds as it was a...

China to allow more pension providers

China will expand its commercial pension pilot scheme nationwide from March 1 this year and allow other pension providers to participate in addition to six Chinese life insurers that have been allowed previously, China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission said on Monday (February 21). CBIRC asked pension providers to keep exploring new products to cater to the need of new economy and flexible workers. It initiated a one-year pilot scheme for commercial pension products in Zhejiang and Chongqing province from June...

Earnings Inequality and Dynamics in the Presence of Informality: The Case of Brazil

By Niklas Engbom, Gustavo Gonzaga, Christian Moser & Roberta Olivieri Using rich administrative and household survey data spanning 34 years from 1985 to 2018, we document a series of new facts on earnings inequality and dynamics in a developing country with a large informal sector: Brazil. Since the mid-1990s, both inequality and volatility of earnings have declined significantly in Brazil’s formal sector. Higher-order moments of the distribution of earnings changes show cyclical movements in Brazil that are similar to those...

The Informal Economy Revisited: Examining the Past, Envisioning the Future

By Martha Che & Françoise Carré This landmark volume brings together leading scholars in the field to investigate recent conceptual shifts, research findings and policy debates on the informal economy as well as future challenges and directions for research and policy. Well over half of the global workforce and the vast majority of the workforce in developing countries work in the informal economy, and in countries around the world new forms of informal employment are emerging. Yet the informal workforce...

Extending pension policy in emerging Asia: An overlapping-generations model analysis for Indonesia

By George Kudrna, John Piggott & Phitawat Poonpolkul This paper examines the economy-wide effects of government policies to extend public pensions in emerging Asia - particularly pertinent given the region’s large informal sector and rapid population ageing. We first document stylized facts about Indonesia’s labour force, drawing on the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS). This household survey is then used to calibrate micro behaviours in a stochastic, overlapping-generations (OLG) model with formal and informal labour. The benchmark model is calibrated...

Tunji Andrews is Building Awabah, a Pension Platform for Nigeria´s Informal Sector

The world’s population is expected to grow by 2 billion people from 7.7 billion in 2019 to 9.7 billion in 2050. The report suggested that nine countries would make up over half the projected growth of the global population, five of which are African countries – Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Tanzania and Egypt. In agreement, Cities Alliance reported that about 95 per cent of this growth will happen in low and middle-income countries globally. Africa is...

India’s APY scheme sees gradual increase in membership

The number of subscribers under the government-administered pension scheme, the Atal Pension Yojana (APY), has exceeded 7.1m as of 24 January this year, Parliament has been told. “As per information received from PFRDA, 7,106,743 subscribers have been enrolled under APY up to 24 January 2022, during the financial year 2021-22,” Minister of State for Finance Bhagwat Karad said in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament. In FY20 (the financial year ended 31 March 2020), there...

Ghana. Campaign to register private, informal sector workers to roll out in April – SSNIT

Pension schemes are for all workers-SSNIT The Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) has revealed that it will commence a sensitization campaign in April to encourage informal and private sector workers to patronize the pension scheme. Read also Tunji Andrews is Building Awabah, a Pension Platform for Nigeria´s Informal Sector Acting Public Affairs Manager of SSNIT, Charles Akwei Garshong, speaking on JoyNews’ The Law, on Sunday said the campaign will specifically target celebrities and all those in the informal sector, to enlighten...

Malaysia. We need a wholesome approach to retirement

For an individual, especially one who is not pensionable, retirement planning is rightly a 30-year consideration but, in reality, most would only start to look at their financial circumstances in the last five to ten years to retirement. While we should be concerned that 6.1 million out of the nearly 15 million Employees Provident Fund (EPF) members have less than RM10,000 in their EPF accounts, simplistic proposals to tinker with the dividend rate based on the amount held in one’s...

January 2022

Financial Attitude and Pension Savings Among Informal Economy Workers in Ghana: Application of the Theory of Planned Behaviour

By Dominic Buer Boyetey, Francis Enu-Kwesi The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) was applied to examine the financial attitude of informal economy workers in pension saving. This was against the background that informal economy workers were left out of formal pension schemes while micro pension schemes (MPS) remain as options that can guarantee economic security after retirement for people with the right financial attitudes. We used interview schedules and interview guides to collect quantitative and qualitative responses concurrently on key...