May 2017

23May

ILO official vows to protect Liberian workers

The head of the International Labour Organization (ILO) for English-speaking West African states, Dennis Zulu, has promised that his institution will work toward ensuring that Liberia has in place a social protection regime that protects the country’s workers.The ILO is one of several UN agencies responsible for the promotion of social protection of workers globally. Zulu who is ILO liaison officer for Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, is quoted by a Labour ministry release as saying social protection is a...

May 23, 2017
News
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23May

US. Trump Budget to Cut Federal Pensions

The Trump administration’s 2018 budget to be released tomorrow will include a range of proposed spending cuts. The budget will call for cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, and other entitlement programs. These reforms come on top of proposed cuts to discretionary programs released in March. There is more good news. The budget will propose cuts to the fat benefit packages received by federal workers. An April CBO report found that benefits for the government’s civilian workers were 47 percent higher,...

May 23, 2017
News
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23May

Roads & pensions swept up in Puerto Rico’s $123bn bankruptcy

Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy process has spread to the territory’s pension system and highway authority, bringing the amount involved to over $120 billion and far exceeding the previous municipal bankruptcy record. The Employees Retirement System (ERS) and the Highways and Transportation Authority (HTA) were added to the proceedings already involving the territory’s government and the island’s sales tax financing corporation (COFINA). Puerto Rico and its agencies are roughly $74 billion in debt. While there are conflicting estimates about the gap between the...

May 23, 2017
News
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23May

Pension schemes and longevity assumptions – what’s another year?

The longevity assumptions used for the valuation of pension benefits can have a material impact on a company’s balance sheet. The actuarial profession’s most recent research on UK longevity trends has been released to an unusually high level of fanfare. The findings have even caught the attention of the political world, generating prominent headlines ahead of the June general election. The latest data highlights that, although life expectancy is expected to continue increasing in the future, the overall pace...

May 23, 2017
News
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22May

The Swiss Occupational Pension System: A Governance View

By Nadège Bregnard (University of Neuchatel) This paper describes the current Swiss occupational pension system with a focus on its governance aspects by emphasizing on the minimum guarantees established by the law, the governance-related requirements, and the most recent supervision framework. It documents in details how the various and different Swiss pension funds are structured and organised and identify six key structure characteristics to classify them. The major distinction with other country pension systems is that pure defined-contributions plans do...

May 22, 2017
Articles, Regulation, Supervision, System Sustainability, ,
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22May

Interactions between Financial Incentives and Health in the Early Retirement Decision

By Pilar Garcia-Gomez & Eddy van Doorslaer (Erasmus University Rotterdam); Titus J. Galama (USC Center for Economic and Social Research) & Ángel López Nicolás (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) We present a theory of the relation between health and retirement that generates testable predictions regarding the interaction of health, wealth and financial incentives in retirement decisions. The theory predicts (i) that wealthier individuals (compared to poorer individuals) are more likely to retire for health reasons (affordability proposition), and (ii) that health problems...

May 22, 2017
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, ,
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22May

Dangerous Flexibility – Retirement Reforms Reconsidered

By Axel H. Börsch-Supan, Tabea Bucher-Koenen, Vesile Kutlu-Koc & Nicolas Goll (Max Planck Society for the Advancement of the Sciences) Flexible retirement is supposed to increase labor supply of older workers without touching the third rail of pension politics, the highly unpopular increase of the retirement age. While this may have intuitive appeal, this paper shows that it might be wishful thinking. Economic theory tells us that flexible retirement policies can have a zero or positive effect on labor force...

May 22, 2017
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, , ,
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22May

México. Sector financiero se unirá para incentivar ahorro entre los mexicanos

Los bancos, las aseguradoras y las Administradoras de Fondos para el Retiro (Afores) trabajan en conjunto con el propósito de establecer un sistema que promueva el ahorro entre los mexicanos. El jefe de la Unidad de Seguros, Pensiones y Seguridad Social de la Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público (SHCP), Oscar Vela, dijo que se busca que cualquier cuenta de ahorro de largo plazo que tenga una persona, ya sea en lo individual o por medio de sus patrones, tenga...

May 22, 2017
Noticias
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22May

Chile. Las AFP encontraron Tumanamá…

Vasco Núñez de Balboa emprendió las primeras expediciones al interior de lo que hoy conocemos como Panamá, a principios del siglo XVI. En el empeño conoció a un aborigen llamado Comagre, quien le procuró algo de oro y esclavos. Sin esperar las Luces europeas, el dulce comercio (Montesquieu) ya hacía de las suyas en América. Según las crónicas, cuando Núñez de Balboa repartió el oro entre sus soldados, algunos alegaron injusticia y se produjo una riña. Entonces, Paquiaco, hijo...

May 22, 2017
Noticias, Op-Ed
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22May

México. Adultos mayores pierden tres de cada $10 de su fondo de retiro

Una disposición fiscal provoca que trabajadores en edad de retiro pierdan hasta tres de cada 10 pesos del ahorro acumulado en su Afore por efecto de una doble tributación, aseguró el organismo encargado de la defensa de los contribuyentes. La merma en el ahorro ocurre por el hecho de que la Ley del Impuesto sobre la Renta (ISR) no reconoce como una prestación laboral, sino como otro ingreso, el ahorro acumulado por el trabajador en la administradora de fondos para...

May 22, 2017
Noticias
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