April 2018

23Apr

Organizing Old Age Pensions for India's Informal Workers: A Case Study of a Sector-Driven Approach

By M.R. Narayana (University of Mysore) About 88 percent of India’s total labor force is composed of informal (officially labeled “unorganized”) workers. As many as 388 million such workers lack old age income security by way of a pension system. The Atal Pension Yojana (APY) is the latest contributory, national-level old age pension scheme for unorganized workers, with an entry age of 18–40 years. In other words, all current unorganized workers above the age of 40 are excluded. How could...

April 23, 2018
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, , ,
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February 2018

26Feb

India. Retirement plan: How real estate investment can help millennials secure their future

Game changers, disruptors, early adopters and digital pioneers – these are some of the epithets that Indian millennials sport with pride, and why not! They have been championing the cause of a more technology-driven India, setting the ground rules for the ongoing digital transformation. Market trends lie at their mercy, and they have both the power and the desire to greatly influence consumption patterns. Armed with evolved sensibilities and a global outlook, they are vastly different from the generations...

February 26, 2018
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January 2018

22Jan

Simulating Pension Income Scenarios with Pencalc: An Illustration for India’s National Pension System

By Renuka Sane (Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi) & William Joseph Price (World Bank) This paper sets out initial results from a new modeling exercise for Defined Contribution (DC) pensions. It develops a package called penCalc based on the open source software language R, which is popular in the academic and modeling communities. All the coding is made freely available. The tool is illustrated for India's DC National Pension System. The aim is not to present the perfect model for...

January 22, 2018
Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, Regulation, , , ,
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22Jan

Simulating Pension Income Scenarios with Pencalc: An Illustration for India's National Pension System

By Renuka Sane (Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi) & William Joseph Price (World Bank) This paper sets out initial results from a new modeling exercise for Defined Contribution (DC) pensions. It develops a package called penCalc based on the open source software language R, which is popular in the academic and modeling communities. All the coding is made freely available. The tool is illustrated for India's DC National Pension System. The aim is not to present the perfect model for...

January 22, 2018
Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, Regulation, , , ,
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01Jan

India. New fund managers and more incremental reform in pensions

The year 2017 saw some important developments in the pension sector, which is dominated in India by the Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF) and the National Pension System (NPS). As any development in the sector impacts the savings of millions of individuals, even a minor change goes through many deliberations, and could take time. The developments in withdrawal rules, taxability and ease of operation, in 2017, too were incremental in nature. Similarly, no single big bang change is expected in 2018....

January 1, 2018
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November 2017

10Nov

India. Maintaining NPS return at over 10 per cent to be examined: PFRDA chief Hemant Contractor

PFRDA Chairman Hemant Contractor today called for examining sustainability of high returns of over 10 per cent to government employee NPS subscribers at a time when interest rates are in decline. SBI Pension Funds, UTI Retirement Solutions and LIC Pension Fund Ltd are the three government-managed pension funds hired by the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority of India (PFRDA) that offers returns in the range of 10.16-10.52 per cent to central government employees. For the state level, the interest...

November 10, 2017
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October 2017

02Oct

India. Should NPS managers invest in mutual funds?

The National Pension System (NPS) has dedicated fund managers, called pension fund managers (PFMs), to manage the money you invest in it. But did you know, when you choose to let your NPS money be invested in equity, they are allowed to invest it in mutual funds? For you, as an NPS subscriber, this means added costs because you pay an investment fee to the pension fund managers apart from bearing the underlying expenses of mutual funds. Among the...

October 2, 2017
News, Slider
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September 2017

26Sep

CPPIB allocates $1 billion for Indian public market investments

Not all foreign funds are balking at Indian equities -spooked by rich valuations, slow corporate earnings or at the growing prospects of interest rate hikes in the US. Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), the most active Canadian investor in India, has just reaffirmed its commitment, by allocating a dedicated $1-billion corpus, exclusively for public market investments, said multiple sources aware. As one of the 10 largest retirement funds in the world, the initial thesis of CPPIB has been to...

September 26, 2017
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25Sep

India. A year on, still no decision on pension fund managers

On 17 September 2016, the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) invited fresh bids for managing funds for the private sector National Pension System (NPS). But a year later, the authority is yet to finalise the bids and issue fresh licences to the pension fund managers (PFMs) of NPS. In the interim, the managers continue to operate through an extension. “The request for proposal for the PFMs was valid till July. However, the regulator sought an extension of...

September 25, 2017
News, Slider
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08Sep

Financial Literacy and Inclusive Growth: Challenges and Opportunities

By Dinesha P. T. Sr. (University of Mysore) In India, financial literacy could now be only for the disadvantaged needy / underprivileged / poor but this is a continuous process where all citizens of the country should be periodically educated, which would become a certain tool to pave for the economic growth and the strength of the country. Recently our Prime Minister has announced series of ambitious social security schemes, relating to the pension and insurance sector and intended at...

September 8, 2017
Adequacy, Articles, Labor Market, Slider-Left, ,
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