June 2026

South Korea. [Retirement Pension Investment Strategy] “During Booms, Focus on Indexes… Systematic Investing Is Key to Beating Volatility”

Last year, for the first time ever, the accumulated amount of retirement pension funds in Korea surpassed 500 trillion won, illustrating the continuous growth of the domestic retirement pension market. In addition, the Korean stock market has been experiencing a record-breaking bull run, and the domestic exchange-traded fund (ETF) market has also expanded to 500 trillion won, leading to greater public interest in financial investment than ever before. However, despite this rapid growth, the polarization of returns among retirement...

May 2026

A PRISMA-Based Systematic Review of Gender Inequality in Uruguay’s Pension System

By Emre Kurt This paper examines the gendered effects of pension and retirement systems in Uruguay through a systematic literature review, motivated by persistent inequalities arising from contributory social protection models that reflect labor-market disparities and unequal caregiving responsibilities. Using the PRISMA 2020 framework, the study identifies and evaluates 21 relevant studies selected from an initial pool of 205 records, applying a gender-audit approach to distinguish between research with central and partial gender analysis. The findings reveal a methodologically diverse...

March 2026

Non-contributory Pension Programs and Intra-household Inequality

By José L. Casco Non-contributory pension schemes are increasingly prevalent as countries seek to combat poverty, yet their role in shaping inequality remains underexplored. This paper studies how such programs alter intra-household inequality using data from Mexican household income and expenditure surveys. The analysis first examines a local pension program in Mexico City, embedding an age-based quasi-experimental design to identify beneficiaries within a structural model of extended households. Results show that the program shifted resources from men to women and...

Why Social Security Is Essential to Measuring Wealth Inequality

By Knowledge at Wharton Staff In this Q&A, professor Sylvain Catherine discusses why including Social Security fundamentally changes how we measure wealth inequality. His paper “Social Security and Trends in Wealth Inequality” was co-authored by Max Miller and Natasha Sarin and recently won the Dimensional Fund Advisors First Prize from the American Finance Association. The paper was previously awarded the Marshall Blume Prize in Financial Research from Wharton’s Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research, given annually to the best...

Closing the gender income gap: from paycheck to pension

By Allianz Research Women have made measurable progress over recent decades in narrowing gender pay gaps and increasing labor-force participation – but structural gaps persist. Across the OECD, the unadjusted gender pay gap – the percentage difference between the average earnings of all men and all women without accounting for differences in job type, hours worked, experience or seniority – has declined from 21% in the early 2000s to 13.7% in 2024, and female labor-force participation has risen steadily to 71%, compared with 81% of men. However, single metrics do not capture the full economic impact...

Europe must close the rights gap for migrants and asylum seekers with disabilities

Migrants and asylum seekers with disabilities continue to face systemic exclusion from protection, support, and integration systems across the European Union, despite the EU’s human rights obligations. In response, IRAP and EDF have jointly launched a new policy brief, “A Pact That Excludes: Closing the Protection Gap for Migrants and Asylum Seekers with Disabilities in the European Union,” showing that EU migration and asylum systems remain largely inaccessible and discriminatory for people with disabilities. This briefing analyses the EU Pact on Migration and...

February 2026

Fairness Views, Pension Benefits, and Heterogeneity in Life Expectancy

By Maria Chaykina Notional Defined Contribution (NDC) pension schemes convert accumulated pension wealth into an annuity, based on an average life expectancy at retirement. When longevity differs across social groups, a single conversion factor implies systematic transfers from shorter-lived to longer-lived individuals. This motivates proposals to differentiate benefits by socio-demographic characteristics related to life expectancy. We study whether such differentiation is perceived as fair using a survey experiment involving 3,004 Italian residents aged 18-66. Respondents completed an incentivised allocation task...

December 2025

Why is inequality so high in Latin America? An interview with Francisco H. G. Ferreira

Economic inequality in Latin America has historically been – and is currently – higher than in much of the rest of the world. For a time, it seemed that large pro-poor programmes, particularly conditional cash transfers (CCTs) – conditional mainly on attending schools and health visits – made some dent on inequality. Such CCTs were pioneered in Mexico, though it has now discontinued that policy, and have been pursued in a major way in Brazil, Colombia, Chile and elsewhere....

Social Security Reforms and Inequality among Older Workers in Spain

By Cristina Bellés-Obrero, Manuel Flores, Pilar Garcia-Gomez, Sergi Jimenez-Martin & Judit Vall Castelló This chapter studies social security reforms and trends in inequalities among older workers over the last decades in Spain. Its main goal is to analyze the redistributive impact of the various pension reforms on older income inequality. Compared to the rules in 1985, recent pension reforms have led to an average increase on Social Security Wealth of approximately 18,000€ for men and 15,000€ for women. This represents...

November 2025

UK. Radical reforms to State Pension system proposed as government battles rising bills – Steve Webb

Experts at pension consultancy LCP specialising in State Pension policy and in demographic trends have joined forces to recommend major changes to the State Pension system. LCP’s ideas have been fed into the Government’s review of the State Pension Age, and would help to square the circle between the need to increase pension ages and the need to avoid penalising those whose life expectancy is much lower than average. One key measure used by the Government to assess the sustainability...