February 2017

Defined ambition pensions – Have the Dutch found the golden mean for retirement savings?

By Erik Schouten & Thurstan Robinson In February 2012, the UK minister for pensions proposed that companies should perhaps be able to provide a new type of pension – Defi ned Aspiration pensions or Defi ned Ambition (DA) pensions, as they are called in the Netherlands. In this article, we take a closer look at DA pensions, examining the Dutch experiences to date with the introduction of DA pensions . We look at what DA pensions have to offer employers...

Beyond Contributory Pensions : Fourteen Experiences with Coverage Expansion in Latin America

By Rafael Rofman, Ignacio Apella and Evelyn Vezza Latin America's population is aging, and many among the growing elderly population are not protected by traditional pension schemes. In response, policy makers have been reevaluating their income protection systems so that between 2000 and 2013, the majority of Latin American countries reformed their social pension schemes to provide near-universal coverage for the elderly. Before this unprecedented wave of reform, most income protection in Latin America was provided through contributory pensions available...

Do Savings Increase in Response to Salient Information about Retirement and Expected Pensions?

By Mathias Dolls, Philipp Doerrenberg, Andreas Peichl and Holger Stichnoth How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As of 2004, the German pension authority started to send out annual letters providing detailed and comprehensible information about the pension system and individual expected pension payments. This reform did not change the level of pensions, but only manipulated the knowledge about and salience of expected...

Saving and taxation in a voluntary pension system : toward an agent-based model

By Balázs Király Mandatory pension systems only partially replace old-age income, therefore the government also operates a voluntary pension system, where savings are matched by government grants. Accounting for the resulting tax expenditure, our models describe the income flow from shortsighted to farsighted workers. 1. In rational models, explicit results are obtained, showing the limited learning of shortsighted workers. 2. In agent-based models, this learning is improved and this raises the shortsighted workers' saving and reduces perverse income redistribution. (more…)