August 2025
19Aug

US. New Portable Benefits Bill Aims To Help Gig Workers, But Worker Classification Still Matters

Senator Bill Cassidy (R- IL) uncovered the Unlocking Benefits for Independent Workers Act to prevent gig worker misclassification. Under this legislation, companies will be able to voluntarily offer portable benefits without employing gig workers and having to pay for unemployment insurance, overtime pay, and workers' compensation. For some time, there has been a disagreement between labor advocates and large companies like Uber or Lyft over portable benefits. Gig workers have been advocating for worker protections, while larger companies have fought back, deeming them...

August 19, 2025
News, ,
Read more...
19Aug

Life Behind the Cart in Sierra Leone’s Informal Sector

On any given day, through the dusty or muddy streets of Shell New Road, Freetown, you’ll find Hassan Sesay, 43, pushing his heavy cart, navigating potholes and broken roads, hustling to deliver goods that don’t even belong to him but upon which his entire livelihood depends. Sesay was born along Lunsar Road in Makeni to a builder father and a trader mother. Life was hard. His parents could not afford to send him to school, and his childhood dream of...

August 19, 2025
News, ,
Read more...
15Aug

Social Security isn’t the broken piece of America’s retirement crisis. Here’s what really needs to be fixed.

In the beginning, the aims of Social Security were both noble and modest. “We have tried to frame a law,” said President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the signing of the Social Security Act, “which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.” It was Aug. 14, 1935. The key phrase was “some measure of protection.” Social Security was never meant to be the principal...

August 15, 2025
News,
Read more...
05Aug

US. Republicans want to give Uber workers benefits. There’s a catch.

Should independent contractors get employment benefits? The question has fueled decades of legal and political battles — and it might finally be coming to an end for the roughly 58 million people who currently work as freelancers, contractors and gig workers across America. Three Republican senators — led by Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who chairs the chamber’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee — have introduced bills to expand benefits like health insurance and retirement savings for contractors. The legislation...

August 5, 2025
News, ,
Read more...

July 2025
25Jul

Pensions in Spain: A Reform that Backfires

By Julián Díaz Saavedra & Javier Díaz-Giménez After the pension policy reversal that took place at the end of the past decade, the Spanish government approved a pack of new parametric changes to its public pension system, to cope with the present and future Spanish pension system imbalance. To study these changes, we use a large-scale overlapping generations model calibrated to the Spanish Economy, and show that this pension reform backfires. This is because these changes bring no significant variation...

July 25, 2025
Articles, System Sustainability, , , ,
Read more...
15Jul

Retirement Then, Now, and Next

By Teresa Ghilarducci & The SCEPA Team  Late Baby Boomers (age 59-67), Generation X (age 43-58) and Millennials (age 27-42) are retiring under much worse conditions than Early Baby Boomers (between age 68-76 in 2022). This fact gets obscured by research that paints an optimistic picture of retirement security that only really existed for Early Baby Boomers. Later generations have been impacted by changes to the conditions of retirement that Early Baby Boomers did not experience. This includes: the shift...

July 15, 2025
Articles, System Sustainability, , , ,
Read more...
10Jul

US. 7 Things Retirees Need To Know About the Big Beautiful Bill Act

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed into law by President Donald Trump over the July 4, 2025, weekend, is a sweeping multitrillion-dollar package that blends tax cuts with significant spending reductions and changes to the social safety net.1 For retirees, the new law brings both opportunities and uncertainties—from temporary tax relief on Social Security benefits to potential changes in required retirement distributions. While some provisions offer immediate benefits, others create planning challenges that could affect retirement strategies for years to come....

July 10, 2025
News, ,
Read more...
09Jul

US. Retirement Industry Responds to Passage of ‘Big Beautiful Bill’

The retirement industry has raised few qualms about the passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” but President Donald Trump’s key legislation gives the sector little to shout about, industry sources say. The new law does expand health savings accounts and makes some good on Trump’s campaign promise to not tax Social Security—it instead provides a temporary expanded deduction of up to $6,000 for those 65 or older if they make less than $75,000 per year (or less than $150,000 for...

July 9, 2025
News, ,
Read more...

June 2025
19Jun

US. Social Security’s Finances Erode Further, Risking Benefit Cuts

The Social Security program faces a longstanding financing shortfall that, if left unaddressed, would slash millions of retirees’ crucial monthly benefit payments in just eight years. The deteriorating financial outlook for the retirement program, which supports roughly 61 million Americans, was released in its annual trustees report on Wednesday. It is now expected to run out of money nine months earlier than previously projected, which means benefits could be reduced by 23 percent if Congress does not act to bolster...

June 19, 2025
News, ,
Read more...
13Jun

Nepal. Social Security Fund: Over 2,000 claim health services daily

The government has introduced a new policy requiring companies to be affiliated with the Social Security Fund (SSF) in order to renew their registrations. However, the Fund’s regular programs have not yet succeeded in attracting a large number of employers and workers. This provision has been included in the government’s policy and program presented in Parliament for the upcoming fiscal year. To date, around 20,700 employers and nearly 2.3 million contributors have enrolled in the Social Security Fund. Yet, according to...

June 13, 2025
News,
Read more...