February 2020

Progress and Challenges of Nonfinancial Defined Contribution Pension Schemes

The aim of this anthology is to provide new contributions to the collective knowledge of the issues and challenges of designing mandated and earnings-related universal public pension schemes (UPPS), in which a universal public nonfinancial defined contribution (NDC) scheme is one of four design options. In 1994, Nonfinancial Defined Contribution (NDC) Pension Schemes left the crib and was taking its first steps in Sweden, Italy, and Latvia. A couple of years later a fourth sibling was born in Poland, with...

Health, Wealth, and Informality over the Life Cycle

By Julien Albertini, Xavier Fairise, Anthony Terriau How do labor market and health outcomes interact over the life cycle in a country characterized by a large informal sector and strong inequalities? To quantify the effects of bad health on labor market trajectories, wealth, and consumption, we develop a life-cycle heterogeneous agents model with a formal and an informal sector. We estimate our model using data from the National Income Dynamics Study, the first nationally representative panel study in South Africa. We...

Latin Americans Expect To Have ‘Gaps’ In Retirement Income: LIMRA

A new study finds that 64% of Latin American adults expect to have significant gaps in their retirement funds when they turn 60, and 52% don’t believe the income from their government-funded pension (Social Security) and their employer-sponsored pension will cover basic living expenses. Also Read Which countries’ workers spend the longest (and shortest) in retirement? The study was conducted by Secure Retirement Institute and the Society of Actuaries (SOA) Almost half of Latin American consumers consider it their...

Greece. Pension hikes to come in June

The new bill by the Labor Ministry that was tabled on Monday in Parliament creates a new landscape for pensions and social security contributions. The interventions promoted have led to a strong reaction by many unions, which have decided to call a 24-hour strike for Tuesday. Among the many changes it includes, in line with the recent decisions by the Council of State, are increases in the replacement rates for workers with more than 30 years of insured labor,...

Retirement Migration from the U.S. to Latin American Colonial Cities (International Perspectives on Aging Book 27)

By Philip D. Sloane, Sheryl Zimmerman, Johanna Silbersack This book provides a comprehensive overview of a growing phenomenon in migration: retired Americans moving to Latin America. Through in-depth profiles of two of the most popular destinations – Cuenca, Ecuador and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, the book provides a unique commentary on the social forces shaping this new diaspora and its impact on the settings to which retirees relocate.  Sections of the book address the lives and activities of retirees themselves; their...

Pension inequality: Not enough is being done to close the wealth gap for women of colour in retirement

Since the dawn of auto-enrolment in 2012, the narrative from some in the corridors of power is that we have a pensions system which works for everybody. Not quite. While more than 10 million more workers have started saving over the past eight years, we still have a long way to go before we can argue with a straight face that the playing field for retirement saving is a level one. We now have more evidence about who the...

Measuring the ethnicity pensions gap

By The people´s pension Last year The People’s Pension examined in detail the drivers of the yawning gap in pension income between women and men, as the first part of a series examining the UK’s ‘under-pensioned’. Our second report focuses on another dramatically underpensioned group: ethnic minorities. New calculations by The People’s Pension reveal that the UK’s overall ethnicity pension gap – the percentage difference in pension income for pensioners who belong to an ethnic minority group compared to pensioners...

January 2020

UK’s ethnic minority pensioners are GBP3,350 a year worse off

In the UK, the average pensioner from an ethnic minority is GBP3,350 a year worse off than other people their age, according to new analysis from The People’s Pension. The pension provider’s new report, Measuring the Ethnicity Pension Gap, highlights that the average ethnic minority pensioner’s income is 24.4 per cent less than their white counterpart. The divide is even greater from a gender perspective; on average, the gap in annual pension income between a female pensioner from...

Risk and Equity Release Mortgages in the UK

By: Tripti Sharma, Declan French, Donal G. McKillop Accessing elderly housing wealth through equity release mortgages (ERMs) continue to be the focus of policy debates about how to pay for social care and how to support retirement incomes in the UK. We demonstrate in this paper that the spatial concentration of this market in just a few regions is not due to demand but to the risks faced by suppliers. We show that by ignoring regional variations in No Negative...

Germany’s other migration wave: the pensioner exodus

As retirement neared a decade ago, German butcher Waldemar Hackstaetter took stock of his finances and concluded he and wife Hildegard couldn't afford to remain in their home country. So they moved to rural Bulgaria, where they knew their combined income of 1,200 euros (£1,026) would buy a lot more. Read Also Greek Authorities to Raise Pensions after Years of Cutbacks "The month stretched further than our pension did (in Germany) and we didn't want to become a burden to...