July 2024

Pension Systems (Un) Sustainability and Fiscal Constraints: A Comparative Analysis

By Michael Wickens, Vito Polito & Burkhard Heer Using an overlapping generations model, two new indicators of public pension system sustainability are proposed: the pension space, which measures the capacity to pay for pension expenditures out of labour taxation, and the pension space exhaustion probability reflecting demographic uncertainties. These measures reveal that the pension spaces of advanced economies are strikingly different. Most nations have little scope to further finance pensions out of labour income  taxation over the next thirty years....

Unemployment in Informal Labor Markets in Developing Countries

By Emily Breza & Supreet Kaur Developing countries typically exhibit low rates of rural wage employment. For example, in India, male workers whose primary source of earnings is wage labor report working on only 46 percent of days per year.1 Bangladesh has a similarly low 55 percent rate of employment among landless males, and the rates are even lower in sub-Saharan Africa. What do these low employment rates mean? One possibility is that they reflect extremely high involuntary unemployment. Alternatively, the rates...

Contratación en Latinoamérica: Reporte 2024

Por Talin Terzakyan La región de América Latina ha mostrado un crecimiento impresionante en el sector de contratación, marcando un aumento significativo en la demanda de talento local y una mejora en las condiciones salariales. Este auge se debe a una combinación de factores, como la adopción creciente de tecnologías digitales como la inteligencia artificial, la globalización del mercado laboral y la capacidad de adaptación y versatilidad de los profesionales latinoamericanos. Además, la tendencia hacia el trabajo remoto y los...

Sistemas de pensiones no contributivos en América Latina y el Caribe: avanzar en solidaridad con sostenibilidad

Por Alberto Arenas de Mesa & Claudia Robles La expansión de los sistemas de pensiones no contributivos en la región constituye uno de los principales hitos en la construcción de las arquitecturas de la protección social en un contexto marcado por una alta informalidad laboral, un acelerado envejecimiento y amplias brechas y desigualdades, incluidas las desigualdades de género. En este siglo se observa un aumento sustantivo de la cobertura de los sistemas de pensiones no contributivos, que en 2022 llegaban...

El futuro de las pensiones y la economía del comportamiento

Por Diego Valero En este articulo se tratan cuestiones vinculadas a la economía conductual o economía del comportamiento aplicada a las pensiones, inversiones y ahorro de largo plazo. Conviene por tanto conocer que la economía conductual integra fundamentos de la economía convencional junto a preceptos extraídos de la sociología y especialmente la psicología, y que trata de entender los mecanismos que se activan en la toma de decisiones, poniendo de manifiesto que los seres humanos tenemos limitaciones cognitivas que nos...

UK. ‘Astonishing’ surge in pensioners paying top tax rate

The number of pensioners paying the highest rate of tax has doubled in just a year following a cut in thresholds. More than 100,000 taxpayers over the age of 65 will pay 45p in the pound on their income in the 2023-2024 tax year, projected HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) figures have revealed. This is up from just 55,000 the year before, according to the data released to The Telegraph under a Freedom of Information request. The number of pension-age taxpayers hit...

US. A Philly Small Business Network May Have an Answer to America’s Retirement Crisis

Americans are woefully underprepared for retirement. So it's no surprise that employer-sponsored retirement programs are a high priority for all workers. Fifty-five-year olds in the U.S. currently have median retirement savings of less than $50,000, and two-thirds fear they will outlive their savings, a Prudential report recently revealed. However, only around one-third of small employers offer retirement savings plans, according to Fidelity Investment's 2023 Small Business Retirement Index, which cited time and cost as the biggest barriers small-business owners face in offering retirement benefits. First, employers must pay...

Japan to abolish gender-specific survivor’s pension benefits, introduce fixed-term payments

The Japanese welfare ministry is set to revise the survivor's welfare pension for men and women in their 20s to 50s without children, changing it to a five-year fixed-term benefit from the current gender-specific rule where the widow receives the benefit indefinitely if she is 30 or older, while the widower cannot receive payments unless he is 55 or older. The planned adjustment will be made over several decades to ensure that current recipients won't face a disadvantage. The ministry...

Pensionistas con esperanza de vida reducida e incentivos fiscales del IRPF: Cobertura del riesgo de longevidad

Por Laura González-Vila Puchades & Jorge De Andrés Sánchez  El sector asegurador español solo ofrece rentas de supervivencia obtenidas con tablas de mortalidad de la población general. Así, los incentivos fiscales del IRPF para la contratación de rentas complementarias a la pensión pública de jubilación suponen un agravio comparativo para personas con esperanza de vida reducida, pues solo pueden beneficiarse de ellos a precios injustos. En España, como en otros muchos países, no se comercializan las denominadas enhanced annuities (rentas...

Breaking the Vicious Circles of Informal Employment and Low-Paying Work

By Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development This report adds two perspectives on informality. First, it disassembles the mechanics of the deleterious links between informal employment, low-paying work and low skills. It shows that informal employment is highly persistent, and that the vulnerability of informal workers is passed on to their children in the absence of adequate education, skills and social protection policy. Second, the report underscores the double burden of informality and low-paying work that a large share of...