November 2020

South Africa. The scary facts about the gender pension gap

Echoing concerns raised by the World Economic Forum earlier this year, 10X Investments’ new South African Retirement Reality Report adds more data showing this worrying trend of women falling further behind men. 10X’s third annual Retirement Reality Report (RRR20) shows that the retirement savings gap between the genders has grown in the last year, not only because the gender pay gap has widened, but because many women continue to reject the best option they have for narrowing the gap,...

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival

By Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan This original and panoramic book proposes that the underlying forces of demography and globalisation will shortly reverse three multi-decade global trends – it will raise inflation and interest rates, but lead to a pullback in inequality. “Whatever the future holds”, the authors argue, “it will be nothing like the past”. Deflationary headwinds over the last three decades have been primarily due to an enormous surge in the world’s available labour supply, owing...

October 2020

Life-Care Tontines

By Peter Hieber, Nathalie Lucas This paper builds on the advantage of pooling mortality and morbidity risks, and their inherent natural hedge. We focus on classical mutual risk pooling schemes, i.e. tontines, and introduce a ``life-care tontine", which in addition to retirement income targets the needs of long-term care coverage for an ageing population. This scheme reduces adverse selection costs and is actuarially fair at each time. Pooling heterogeneous risks (i.e. different age groups) is shown to reduce overall...

Changes to Household Retirement Savings Since 1989

By Andrew G. Biggs This report uses two new data sources to provide insights on the evolution of retirement savings over the past three decades and how future retirees may fare. First, the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances and Distributional Financial Accounts (DFA) provide estimates of both household savings in retirement accounts and any benefits households accrued under a traditionally defined benefit pension. The DFA data show that, from 1989 through 2016, household retirement savings increased for every...

The Changing Nature of Work and Public Pension Coverage: Evidence from the US and Europe

By Axel H. Börsch-Supan, Courtney Coile, Jonathan Cribb, Carl Emmerson, Yuri Pettinicchi We examine non-standard work and its impact on pension coverage via a case study of the US, the UK, and Germany. We find that the share of workers engaged in non-standard work has changed only modestly over time in these three countries, despite the popular perception that a more significant transformation in the nature of work may be underway. We discuss how non-standard work may affect public...

Mercer CFA Institute Global Pension Index 2020

By Merced CFA Institute What makes a world-class pension system in 2020? Pension systems around the world are facing additional pressures in 2020. The widespread economic impact due to COVID-19 has had both immediate and long-term implications for retirees. Additionally, increasing life expectancies and rising pressure on public resources to support the health and welfare of older citizens will affect how citizens around the world will retire in the mid to long-term. “The economic recession caused by...

2020 Global Retirement Index An in-depth assessment of welfare in retirement around the world

By NATIXIS With the world facing immediate issues resulting from the coronavirus pandemic and the economic consequences from the response of governments around the world, wildfires and other natural catastrophes triggered by changing weather and climate patterns, and heightened concerns about social justice and income inequality, the long-term goal of retirement security may not appear to be a top global concern in 2020. In reality, though, the crises we are experiencing today will have long-range implications for global retirement...

The Unequal Burden of Retirement Reform: Evidence from Australia

By Todd Morris As governments try to contain rising expenditure on retirement pensions by increasing eligibility ages, there are concerns that such reforms disproportionately affect poorer households. Using detailed longitudinal data, I examine this trade-off in the context of an Australian reform that increased women’s pension-eligibility age from 60 to 65. While this reform led to significant reductions in net government expenditure, the negative effects on household incomes were concentrated among poorer households. These unequal impacts meant that,...

Workforce Aging, Pension Reforms, and Firm Outcomes

By Francesca Carta, Francesco D’Amuri, Till Von Wachter Raising statutory retirement ages has been a popular policy to increase the labor supply of older workers in the face of population aging. In this paper, we quantify the effect of a sharp and unexpected increase in retirement ages on firms’ input mix and economic outcomes using Italian administrative and survey data on employment, wages, value added and capital. Exploiting information on lifetime pension contributions for the universe of employees, we...

5 retirement security risks that 2020 made worse

Retirement security was already on shaky ground when the calendar turned to January 1, ushering in a year of unprecedented and unexpected challenges that have compounded threats to global retirement security. According to Natixis Investment Managers’ 9th annual Global Retirement Index, the challenges of 2020 have disrupted financial markets, caused widespread unemployment and demanded urgent response from policy-makers, all of which could have long-reaching impacts on retirement security. The goal of the index is to provide an objective tool for...