May 2024
07May

Assuring the sustainability of the Canada Pension Plan: A new consensus is required

By: Keith Ambachtsheer, Malcolm Hamilton, Ed Waitzer   The creation of the Canada and Quebec pension plans in the 1960s and subsequent amendments to them in the 1990s is a compelling story of how governments worked together to create and sustain one of Canada’s greatest public-policy achievements. Today we are faced with the thorny issue of how to determine a fair basis on which Alberta might choose to exit the CPP. When the CPP was created, Ontario requested a provision to allow...

May 7, 2024
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April 2024
26Apr

Ghana. SSNIT reserves projected to hit zero in 12 years – ILO

This was revealed in an actuarial valuation study of the Social Security and National Insurance Trusts (SSNIT) viability. According to ILO, total income including contributions, investment income and other income, will no longer be sufficient to pay for annual expenditures including benefit payments to pensioners by 2029. “Starting in 2029, total income (contributions, investment income and other income) is no longer sufficient to pay for annual expenditures. "The reserve starts to decrease. During the year 2036, the reserve drops to zero” the...

April 26, 2024
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25Apr

China’s unique retirement plan: why children still matter when it comes to support in old age

At the end of last year, the number of people in China aged 65 and above reached 217 million, making up 15.4 per cent of the total population. This has led to concerns that with rapid ageing, the existing pension system may fail to keep pace. As a result, elderly people have turned to raising children to look after them in their old age. This is commonly known as yang er fang lao. Here, the Post explains the phenomenon. What is it ? Simply put yang...

April 25, 2024
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09Apr

UK. Cover story: Pensions are on life support – but how do we save them?

We are in the midst of a pensions crisis. For a long time, experts have warned that UK adults aren’t saving anywhere near enough money to ensure a comfortable, or even moderate, retirement. But now it feels as though we’ve reached breaking point. If pensions were a person, it’s probably safe to say they’d be on life support. Let’s take a quick look at the facts. Around a fifth of working-age private-sector employees — approximately 3.5 million people — do not pay anything...

April 9, 2024
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March 2024
01Mar

US. Retirement Savings System Under Fire at Senate Hearing

A hearing that was billed as “taking a serious look at the retirement crisis in America” with a focus on improving the defined benefit system ended with witnesses agreeing that some reforms are needed, but calling for drastically different measures. The Feb. 28 hearing was held by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Included among the single panel of witnesses testifying were: Teresa Ghilarducci, Irene and Bernard L Schwartz Professor of...

March 1, 2024
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January 2024
19Jan

Pension Funding Index January 2024

By Zorast Wadia The funded status of the country’s 100 largest corporate pension plans, as measured by the Milliman 100 Pension Funding Index (PFI), experienced a modest improvement in 2023, driven by annual investment returns of 9.94%. Declining discount rates, particularly in the fourth quarter, and the corresponding liability (i.e., the projected benefit obligation) increase of 8.33% served to partially offset the asset gains, resulting in a funded status improvement of $4 billion for the year. This gain paled in...

January 19, 2024
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12Jan

Between Individual Risk and State Responsibility: 20 Years of Swedish Premium Pensions

By Anika Seemann  In 2000, the Swedish pension reform of 1998 led to the introduction of a capital-funded pension component with individual investment accounts in the first pillar of the pension system, known as the premium pension. This article takes the 20th anniversary of the Swedish premium pension as an opportunity for a fundamental evaluation. It shows which guiding principles the premium pension system was founded on when it was introduced, which problems have arisen since its introduction, how the...

January 12, 2024
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December 2023
21Dec

UK. Good News — The UK’s Pensions Black Hole Is No More

By John Stepek   Welcome to Money Distilled. I’m John Stepek. Every week day I look at the biggest stories in markets and economics, and explain what it all means for your money. The good news on UK corporate pensions Merryn talks to Kokou Agbo-Bloua, global head of economics, cross-asset and quant research about the outlook for 2024, and why he thinks a slowdown in the US is inevitable. But what should you buy? There was a story over on our Markets Live blog yesterday that caught my eye, as I’d missed...

December 21, 2023
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November 2023
06Nov

Canada. ‘Take your job seriously’: Employment Minister tells Alberta to stick with Canada Pension Plan

Federal Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault says he is against any attempt by the Alberta government to leave the Canada Pension Plan. "I can tell you that the federal government and I are very clearly committed to working with Albertans to keep them in the Canada Pension Plan," Boissonnault told CTV’s Power Play on Friday. "It's simply wrong to politicize pensions." Alberta's governing United Conservative Party contends that the province's workers put more into the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) than they get...

November 6, 2023
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October 2023
27Oct

Allianz Pension Report Latam special 2022

By Allianz Research Even before the pandemic, the pension systems of most Latin American countries ranked in the bottom third in international comparison of their long-term adequacy and sustainability in our last Global Pension Report. The Covid-19 pandemic has been a double blow with respect to pension systems’ adequacy: On the one hand, rocketing unemployment rates diminished the share of the labor force in formal employment that is covered by pension schemes; on the other hand, lower contributions to pension...

October 27, 2023
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