July 2020

15Jul

Greece’s supreme court rules for reimbursement of pension cuts

The Council of State, Greece's supreme administrative court, on Tuesday issued five rulings awarding back payments of wrongfully cut pensions to pensioners for the period between June 2015 and May 2016, ANA reports. The court found in favor of pensioners that had appealed against the pension cuts, seeking their backdated return for the above period. All those that had contested the cuts in court will receive backdated payments.Those that have not yet initiated proceedings for the return of the sums...

July 15, 2020
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13Jul

Older South Africans are taking their wealth and pensions offshore

In the current precarious economic climate, South African residents over age 55, who invested in retirement annuities (RAs), preservation funds or pensions, are increasingly transferring their investments to living annuities with offshore equity exposure. Read also Greece’s supreme court rules for reimbursement of pension cuts Claudia Mendes, international financial planner at Sable International, considers the argument for going offshore. South African residents find themselves investing in a country that has a concentration of resource stocks and a volatile currency. With...

July 13, 2020
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03Jul

Protecting South Asia’s poor and vulnerable against COVID-19

By Lynne Sherburne Benz, Stefano Paternostro, Zaineb Majoka When India went into lockdown in late March as a result of COVID-19, one of the country’s biggest priorities was to ensure access to food. As millions risked starvation, the government mobilized its existing Public Distribution System (PDS) to give away food rations to over 800 million people, thus averting a catastrophic food crisis. As the coronavirus spreads exponentially across South Asia, food insecurity is just one of the many challenges...

July 3, 2020
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June 2020

24Jun

‘Alarming number’: Boomers struggle to save enough for retirement, survey finds

Many baby boomers don’t have nearly enough money to retire. The median amount they have saved for retirement is $144,000, according to a recent survey from Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies, a figure that should be a “call to action” for boomers, said one financial expert. “When we think about it, $144,000 to last in retirement that could be 20 or 30 years just isn’t going to go very far,” said Catherine Collinson, CEO and president of the Transamerica...

June 24, 2020
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20Jun

Wealth Distribution and Retirement Preparation Among Early Savers

By: Alice Henriques, Lindsay Jacobs, Elizabeth Llanes, Kevin B. Moore, Jeffrey P. Thompson. This paper develops a new combined wealth measure using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, by augmenting data on net worth with estimates of defined benefit (DB) pension wealth and expected Social Security wealth. We use this combined wealth concept to explore retirement preparation among groups of households in their pre-retirement years (40-49 and 50-59) and also to explore the concentration of wealth. We find...

June 20, 2020
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11Jun

UK. Workplace pension income rises by more than a third

Income from workplace pensions in the UK has risen by more than a third in just 10 years, analysis by financial services firm Equiniti has revealed. The findings show that average occupational pension income rose from £121 to £167 a week between 2008/09 and 2018/19, representing an increase of 38%. This is despite other sources of income remaining broadly flat or negative, with occupational pensions now accounting for 30% of total average pensioner income, up from 24% in 2008/09. ...

June 11, 2020
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05Jun

Can Low Retirement Savings Be Rationalized?

By John B. Shoven, Sita Slavov, John G. Watson Simple presentations of the life cycle model often suggest a constant level of real consumption in retirement. Similarly, financial planners commonly suggest that people save for retirement in such a way as to enable them to maintain a level retirement standard of living equal to their standard of living while working. However, constant consumption with age is only optimal under the precise and unlikely condition that the subjective rate of...

June 5, 2020
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May 2020
29May

The Effect of Workplace Pensions on Household Saving: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Taiwan

By Tzu‐Ting Yang Population aging causes financial imbalances in pay‐as‐you‐go public pension programs. To remedy this problem, while ensuring the adequacy of retirement savings for employees, many countries complement or substitute public pensions by regulating their workplace pensions. This article exploits a pension reform in Taiwan that has mandated, since 2005, that all private‐sector employers contribute at least 6 percent of an employee's monthly wage to an individual pension account. I use workers in the unaffected sectors as a...

May 29, 2020
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29May

Integrating Social Insurance and Social Assistance Programs for the Future World of Labor

By Robert J. Palacios, David A. Robalino Given the prevalence of informal labor, most countries have combined contributory social insurance programs (pensions, unemployment benefits, and health insurance), with non-contributory insurance programs and several types of "safety nets." All of these programs involve different types of subsidies and taxes, sometimes implicit. Because of design problems and the lack of coordination/integration between programs, these subsidies/taxes tend to cause four problems: 1) they can reduce incentives to contribute to mandatory insurance programs...

May 29, 2020
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26May

US. The No.1 reason people make early withdrawals from retirement funds may surprise you

By John Anderer Retirement is the prize at the end of the work marathon. Any financial advisor or accountant will tell you it’s a good idea to start saving for retirement as early as possible, and the average working adult spends decades adding money, little by little, to his or her retirement fund. When the time comes, that money will be spent on leisure, fun, and everything else we can’t do while working full time. Now, you’re not supposed to touch...

May 26, 2020
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