December 2020

15Dec

Chile’s Great Pension Raid

By Andrés Velasco Because the policies they produce are so ludicrous, populist cycles eventually crash against reality and come to an end. Sadly, for too many Chileans, the crash may come when they reach old age with no retirement savings. How should families pay for the costs of the pandemic? The conservative government’s finance minister proposes that the state should help.Thanks but no thanks, retort members of the country’s congress. Families can use their own accumulated pension savings, and the...

December 15, 2020
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15Dec

​Norway maps cost of extending pension coverage amid clash

The Norwegian government has opened a public consultation on the long-held plan to broaden mandatory occupational pension coverage by removing the lower earnings threshold at which employers make contributions, but worker and employer representations are in sharp disagreement over the terms. The Ministry of Finance published the report it received from the working group convened to come up with a plan on savings “from the first krone” in defined contribution mandatory occupational pension (obligatorisk tjenestepensjon, OTP) schemes. The...

December 15, 2020
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15Dec

Malta. Three in ten pensioners at risk of poverty

The proportion of pensioners at risk of living in poverty in Malta is increasing year on year, reaching 29.1 per cent of over 65s last year. And older women are more likely to teeter on the brink of poverty due to having to rely solely on their husband's pension. While all other age groups have seen a reduction in poverty since 2013, those aged over 65 have seen an increase. The latest details were revealed in an evaluation of...

December 15, 2020
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15Dec

A Retirement Dashboard for the U.S.?

Noting that the U.S. retirement system is not easy to navigate, a recent white paper calls for the creation of a retirement dashboard to help savers better manage and keep track of their savings. “While it would not address systemic problems such as coverage, a dashboard could reduce the strain that a complex retirement system imposes on households,” authors David John of the AARP Public Policy Institute, Grace Enda of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, and...

December 15, 2020
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14Dec

South Africa. 1 600 municipal employees’ pensions have lapsed due to ‘non-payment of pension fund contributions’

Several municipalities across the country have defaulted on paying workers' pension contributions to their respective pension funds. Finance Minister Tito Mboweni said municipalities in the Free State, North West and Northern Cape were mostly affected by the default in pension fund contributions. The DA said it would lay charges against the involved municipal officials. While governance failures have all but decimated some of the country's poorest municipalities, errant officials have not been paying millions in employer contributions to workers'...

December 14, 2020
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14Dec

Ireland. A new model for pensions required

Sir, – Reading of the restoration of pension payments to 4,000 of the highest-paid public office-holders and pay increases for judges under the public pay agreement is infuriating. One wonders why these are being restored at all during a crisis, with unprecedented public spending commitments to compensate thousands who have lost their jobs and livelihoods during the pandemic. We are also informed that a number of senior HSE executives will receive lump-sum payments of €300,000 upon retirement and annual...

December 14, 2020
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14Dec

COVID-19 crisis, a wake-up call on social protection for workers

The need for universal social protection in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has been underlined at a virtual conference of trade union leaders from national trade union confederations across continents. Workers’ representatives at the Fourth meeting of the “Social Protection, Freedom and Justice for Workers Network” on 9 December, explained how their organizations’ have contributed to the formulation of national social protection responses to the COVID-19 crisis. They discussed trade union advocacy strategies for social protection at the...

December 14, 2020
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11Dec

Depopulation, Aging, and Living Environments: Learning from Social Capital and Mountainous Areas in Japan (Advances in Geographical and Environmental Sciences)

By Kenji Tsutsumi This book provides perspectives on depopulated areas and regional social capital from positivistic field surveys. Among the developed countries of the world, Japan has a very small amount of national land, with almost 70% of it being in mountainous locations. Concentration of populations and economic capital into large metropolitan areas along with many depopulated and population-aged regions in the mountainous parts can be seen in the country. A very clear regional disparity has arisen in Japan, especially...

December 11, 2020
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11Dec

Population Change and Public Policy

By Billystrom Jivetti, Md. Nazrul Hoque This book provides a solid empirical portrait based on the complexities of demographic components of population change. It describes recent innovations, trends, challenges and solutions to population change and public policy issues, such as but not limited to immigration, gender discrimination in the labor market, student housing, teen pregnancy programs, smoking and alcohol consumption, and environment and self-rated health. As such it provides an interesting platform for academics, researchers, policy makers, and...

December 11, 2020
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11Dec

The Age Profile of Life-Satisfaction after Age 65 in the U.S

By Péter Hudomiet, Susann Rohwedder Although income and wealth are frequently used as indicators of well-being, they are increasingly augmented with subjective measures such as life satisfaction to capture broader dimensions of individuals’ well-being. Based on data from large surveys of individuals, life satisfaction in cross-section increases with age beyond retirement into advanced old age. It may seem puzzling that average life satisfaction would be higher at older ages because older individuals are more likely to experience chronic or...

December 11, 2020
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