February 2020

International Handbook on Ageing and Public Policy (Handbooks of Research on Public Policy)

By Sarah Harper, kate Hamblin With the collective knowledge of expert contributors in the field, The International Handbook on Ageing and Public Policy explores the challenges arising from the ageing of populations across the globe. With an expansive look at the topic, this comprehensive Handbook examines various national state approaches to welfare provisions for older people and highlights alternatives based around the voluntary and third-party sector, families and private initiatives. Each of these issues are broken down further and...

Pensions and Legal Policy: Lessons on the Shift from Public to Private

By Amanda Cooke This monograph explores the historical position of pensions law in the UK and the recent influences which have led to the introduction of Auto-Enrolment and subsequent reforms. Alternative models, such as the US and Australia are also considered as well as the function of law in bringing about political changes. The question of saving for retirement is of national and international importance and many governments are wrestling with the issue of how to deal with the pension...

Demography and Provisions for Retirement – the Pension Composition, a Behavioral Approach

By B.M.S. van Praag, J. Hop Pensions may be provided for in a modern society by a mix of several methods, namely by voluntary individual savings, mandatory fully-funded occupational pension systems, mandatory social security financed by pay-as-you-go, and old-fashioned hoarding in cash. Here, we call the specific mixture of the four systems the pension composition. We assume that individual workers decide on their own individual savings, that the fully-funded occupational system is decided upon by the age cohort of...

How Do Children Affect the Need to Save for Retirement?

By Andrew G. Biggs Children consume a substantial portion of a household’s income while living at home, but are usually financially independent by the time the parents reach retirement age. Relatively little attention has been paid to how children affect parents’ need to save for retirement. In this paper I use expenditure data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to construct life cycle expenditure patterns from households with children and childless households, comparing the two to gain insights...

Pensions and Household Savings: Cross-Country Heterogeneity in Europe

By Anna d’Addio, Muriel Roger, Frederique Savignac We address the question of whether the heterogeneity in savings is partly due to differences in pension wealth across individuals and across countries, using a European harmonised wealth survey (HFCS) combined with estimates of pension wealth (OECD). First, we find significant displacement effects of mandatory pension wealth on non-pension financial wealth at the mean, and a statistically significant crowd-out estimate on the probability of owning real estate property. Second, there is heterogeneity...

Coronavirus fallout hits pensions and ISAs as investors urged not to flinch

The first day back to work after a long holiday is always a bit grating. But for those logging in at the Chinese stock market for the first time since the coronavirus outbreak, all bets were off. Read also Super funds push for lower pension age for Indigenous Australians The rest of the world’s markets have been riding the waves of coronavirus-induced volatility for weeks now as the infection spreads, while the epicenter remained economically silent. Read also Pension inequality:...

Nigeria. Investing pension funds

Money saved by public and private sector workers in Nigeria for their pension under the National Pension Commission (PenCom) reached the N10 trillion mark in 2019, that is, after 15 years of consistent saving. The National Pension Commission, the regulatory body watching over private-sector pension entities that are the Custodians of the money and Pension Fund Administrators that operate like fund retailers, are the ultimate trustees of the pension money owned by about nine million Nigerians. The N10 trillion...

The pension crisis of Latin America

The privatisation of the pension fund system in Latin America was hailed as one of the most important developments of the 1990s. A major challenge for developing countries is the lack of local savings. By definition, developing countries are in transition. They need a great deal of capital to modernise their infrastructure and improve their workforce through better education and health systems. This left most countries highly dependent on international capital flows. The problem is that international capital flows...

World’s Largest Pension Fund Gains on Stocks, Foreign Debt

The world’s biggest pension fund posted a gain for a fourth consecutive quarter, with foreign stocks providing the best return among assets amid a thaw in trade tensions between the U.S. and China. Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund returned 4.6%, or 7.4 trillion yen ($67 billion), in the quarter ended Dec. 31, with assets totaling 168.9 trillion yen, it said Friday in Tokyo. Foreign stocks were the fund’s best performing investment, gaining 9.7%, while domestic equities added 8.6%. The...

CDPQ Goes Local for Private Credit in India

Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, which manages funds primarily for Canadian public and parapublic pension and insurance plans, has formed a partnership with Piramal Asset Management Private Limited to invest in illiquid credit opportunities in India. The two organizations will invest US$300 million, with 75 percent of the money coming from CDPQ and the remainder from Piramal. CDPQ oversees C$326.7 billion (US$246 billion) in net assets. CDPQ’s partnership with Piramal, an India-based manager that is part...