Pension

Pe drumul modernizării societății românești, al cărei ritm a crescut în prima jumătate a secolului al XIX-lea, sunt oameni și fapte despre care încă se mai poate vorbi, chiar dacă oamenii nu au fost dintre corifeii mișcărilor revoluționare de la 1821 sau 1848 și chiar dacă faptele lor nu au contribuit decisiv la schimbările din Moldova și din Țara Românească. Prin acest articol, am reconstituit biografia unui boier moldovean, Iancu Istrati, pe temeiul arhivei sale păstrate la Arhivele Naționale din București și a altor documente ale vremii. Dintre faptele boierului de la Călimănești (ținutul Tutova), care demonstrează practic cum s-a modernizat societatea românească în cele două decenii ce au urmat reinstaurării domniilor pământene la 1821 în Țările Române, am ales: biblioteca, cu cercetarea inventarului și cu descoperirea unora dintre cititorii ei; educația copiilor, cu încercarea de a trimite un băiat la Academia Militară din Sankt-Petersburg și cu prezentarea unor frânturi din învățătura la pension a acestora; administrarea averii, cu măsurile moderne luate pentru sporirea ei și cu înfățișarea succintă a inventarului unei case boierești; legăturile cu membrii importanți ai familiei: cu frații, Nicolae Istrati, scriitor și om politic, și Meletie Istrati, egumen al mănăstirii Slatina și episcop de Huși, și cu cumnatul, Vasile Adamachi, negustor, boier și mare binefăcător al Academiei Române.

The study examined the effect of Contributory Pension Scheme on Nigerian Capital
Market.  The  specific  objectives  were  to  analyze  the  effect  of  Total  Pension  Assets  under Management  on  Total  Market  Capitalization  and  on  Total  Value  of  Deals  of  the  Nigerian Capital  Market.  The  study  was  based  on  Ex-post  facto  research  design.  Ordinary  Least Square Regression was used as analytical technique. It was found that Pension Assets under Management  of  the  Nigerian  Pension  industry  has  positive  and  significant  effect  on  Total Market  Capitalisation  of  the  Nigerian  Capital  Market.  Also,  Pension  Assets  under Management of the Nigerian Pension industry has no positive and significant effect  on Total Value of Deals per year of the Nigerian Capital Market. The positive coefficients indicate that
Total  Pension  Assets  under  Management  can  facilitate  increase  in  Total  Market
Capitalisation and Total Value of Deals per year of the Nigerian Capital  Market. Therefore, the  study  concludes  that  an  increase  in  Total  Pension  Assets  under  Management  would boost upwards the Total Market Capitalisation and Total Value of Deals per year by making more fund available for trading in the Nigerian Capital Market. It is recommended that Total Pension Assets under Management transactions in the Nigerian Capital Market should have a wide mix of investments portfolio so as to avoid liquidity risk challenges.

With less income or little income, old age has become a great deal to worry in bigger cities of India. Even though, government supports the senior citizens with old age pensions, it only helps to cover basic living expenses. Instead of increasing the load on government, let these senior citizens relocate to villages and let government build old age homes in these villages with civic amenities. This will not only improve the living standards of senior citizens of india but also enable them to lend soft loans.

The paper aims to examine an aspect which has not yet been sufficiently addressed in previous studies (Bagavos and Tragaki 2008). It deals with the potential volume of employed population, seen from the supply point of view, in selected EU Member States. The starting point lays on the observation that in certain countries, participation rates for specific age groups are lagging behind maximum observed levels. The basic research question is to quantify to which extent upward trends in participation rates (especially among women and specific age-groups) and migratory inflows could in short or medium term, off-set the bearing of demographic ageing on labour and employment prospects. The main objective of this work is to examine the significance of such an increase in employment rates on pensions sustainability. In particular, the gradual increase of employment rates for various population sub-groups as well as migration from third countries can contibute to sustain employment despite the adverse demographic trends (Bagavos 2003; European Commission 2010).

This paper documents the reversal of pension privatization and the reforms that took place in the 1990s and 2000s in Poland. The report analyses the political economy of different reform proposals, and the characteristics of the new pension system, including laws enacted, coverage, benefit adequacy, financing and contribution rates, governance and social security administration, social dialogue, positive impacts and other key issues of Poland’s pension system.

The increasing difficulties in financing the welfare state and in particular public retirement pensions have been one of the outcomes both of the decrease of fertility and birth rates combined with the increase of life expectancy. The dynamics of retirement pensions are usually studied in Economics using overlapping generation models. These models are based on simplifying assumptions like the use of a representative agent to ease the problem of tractability. Alternatively, we propose to use agent-based modelling (ABM), relaxing the need for those assumptions and enabling the use of interacting and heterogeneous agents assigning special importance to the study of inter-generational relations. We treat pension dynamics both in economics and political perspectives. The model we build, following the ODD protocol, will try to understand the dynamics of choice of public versus private retirement pensions resulting from the conflicting preferences of different agents but also from the coop...

In this work, we made a presentation regarding to the Israeli pension system which was deeply reformed by passing it from a system based on Defined Benefits with huge actuarial deficits to a system based on Defined Contribution actuarial balanced. One of the major by products of this reform is the concentration of the pension market in the hands of

Over the last 100 years, there has been a steady decline in mortality rates. With the unexpected decrease in death rates; variability in the age of death declined and deaths are concentrated to the older years of life, therefore, causing deficits in the pooled funds of insurance and pension providers, which are built upon the underestimated rates. To correctly measure the effect of mortality rates on the financial stability of these providers, longevity risk should be taken seriously. This study aims to investigate the future mortality and longevity risk of three countries with different age structures. Turkey, Germany, and Japan are chosen with respect to their expected life and population distributions. Lee-Carter mortality model is used on the historical census data to forecast future mortality rates. The longevity risk on a hypothetical portfolio is assessed based on static and dynamic mortality table approaches. To determine the impact of longevity risk retrieved from the use o...

Many south-east European states made the transition from socialist to market economies. All described here had to reform their pension systems to match the new context in which these operated. The experiences of 10 countries are reviewed – seven of which were once part of Yugoslavia. Some countries’ reforms were more radical than others. Five of them merely adapted the Bismarckian systems they had inherited; four others adopted the “three pillar” model that the World Bank had been propagating. One went further than that. The four who followed World Bank model were often forced to backtrack. Whatever the longer-term benefits, they generated their own shorter-term fiscal problems. Nonetheless, the most radical reformer gives some indications of possible ways forward. The south-eastern European states do not have financial markets that can support capitalised/funded pension systems. Nor do they have the resources to pay proportional pensions that, at the same time, keep retired people ...

A factor and goal-driven framework for assessing asset allocation and contribution decisions within defined-benefit pension plans is developed in this article. A critical element is setting future benefits with reference to the ability of the pension sponsors to support liabilities under reasonable investment expectations. The approach suggested by the authors combines a micro study of a representative cohort of individuals with an aggregation across a target population to estimate consistency between the micro and macro environments. A stochastic inflation risk factor affects both contribution and spending cash flows. This agent-based model suggested by the authors provides a more realistic framework than traditional approaches for setting pension benefits.

Due to the several factors, the applicability of crisp techniques to the pension debt valuation and fund management is questionable. We take a fuzzy approach and use triangular fuzzy numbers (T.F.N.s) to capture the above imprecision. We suggest that the best pension fund strategy is that of a fuzzy contingent immunization. This will involve an active management of pension plan's assets until the value for the pension threshold is reached, at which time the pension fund manager should switch to a fuzzy immunization strategy. We apply this strategy to the Canadian firm-level data and report results.

The paper argues that wage dispersion between white-collar and blue-collar workers has caused the rise and expansion of pension funds in a direct and long-run structural manner in the USA. Using data from the Saez-Zucman and the St. Louis Fed’s FRED datasets, the argument is empirically analysed on yearly data for the period 1964-2012 in the USA. The results confirm the existence of a long-run relationship of causality from wage dispersion to the share of pension funds within US households’ financial wealth. Applying a vector error correction model to the data it emerges that the variance in pension funds due to wage dispersion starts to rise after the fifth period, and reaches 69% in the tenth period.  .

This document presents an analysis of pension coverage trends in Latin America for the past decades. Its preparation involved the collection, revision, and processing of household surveys in over 18 countries in the region, spanning a period of almost 40 years in some cases. The main goal of this document is to offer comparable data on pension coverage among the economically active population and the elderly, considering the relevance of several demographic, social, and economic variables on these coverage levels. By producing this large and comparable regional dataset, the document supports the discussion of several stylized facts on pension coverage in Latin America. The results show that coverage among active workers is low in most countries, although there has been a relative improvement since the early 1990s. The situation is still distressing among workers in the primary sector or employed by small enterprises as well as for women, primarily because of their persistent lower r...

In this paper, we apply two types of automatic balance mechanism (ABM) to the French first pillar pension system for private sector employees (CNAV). One is based on a tax gap ratio (TGR-ABM) and the other is the smooth ABM (S-ABM) developed by Gannon, Legros and Touze (2013). Two long-run forecast scenarios over the period 2014-2063 are analysed. The first is optimistic (“benchmark”) and assumes a 4.5% unemployment rate and a 1.5% productivity growth rate in the long run. The second is more pessimistic (“prudent”), with a 7.5% unemployment rate and a 1% productivity growth rate in the long run. For the benchmark (respectively prudent) scenario, a TGR-ABM requires, now and for the next 50 years, a 2.8% (respectively 6.3%) decrease in pensions and a 2.9% (respectively 6.7%) increase in the tax rate. An S-ABM requires, for the benchmark (respectively prudent) scenario, an immediate 1.5% (respectively 3.6%) decrease in pensions and a 1.4% (respectively 3.5%) increase in the tax rate. I...

The European Union is currently confronted with major economic and demographic changes that are challenging its ability to maintain strong social cohesion. Some possible solutions can be considered, such as increasing the employment for older workers and for women. In a comparative analysis for ten European countries, Romania has the lowest life expectancy, of 72.2 years, and the largest difference between life expectancy and standard retirement age, of 9.7 years. The private administrated pension funds can be a solution for labour market crisis from Romania; so recently there were adopted and implemented the regulations for this field.

Understanding the motives that underlie Spaniards’ retirement saving decisions is important because many, if not most, future retirees will need to rely on personal savings to maintain a decent standard of living. The governor of the Bank of Spain has stated recently that the current public pension system will not guarantee an adequate pension to the citizens, advising to save now for retirement. In this debate on public pensions, and the complementary role that private pensions might play in Spain, this article has shed light on the decision of Spanish households to engage in individual pension plans and it has identified which factors determine the total amount saved in such retirement plans. Using micro data from the Bank of Spain (Survey of Household Finances 2011), the analysis has revealed that the expectations of lower future income, along with preferences for the financial risk and education, exert an important influence on the likelihood of enrolling in a private pension plan. University education minimizes the myopic behavior of households in the sense of making them more forward-looking and cautious in the face of their future well-being. Additionally using Heckman’s methodology to correct for the problem of selection bias, our results have revealed that liquidity constraints affect negatively the total amount of money saved for retirement.

This study introduces a comprehensive evaluation tool to study the performance of pension schemes. The Pension Scheme Performance Index (PSP-Index) suggests the following factors: education infrastructure growth rate (∆V1), training program growth rate (∆V2), diet improvement growth rate (∆V3), health coverage growth rate (∆V4), life expectancy growth rate (∆V5), pension coverage growth rate (∆V6), labor market demand growth rate (∆V7), total tax collection growth rate (∆V8), and capital expansion growth rate (V9). PSP-index attempts at the standardization of performance measures that have typically applied in pension schemes irrespective of their type and level of development. The model investigates pension scheme performance of five ASEAN-member countries—Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Philippines.

ABSTRACT : In non-financial defined contribution (NDC) pension systems the contribution rate is kept at a constant level. A key element is the balance mechanism which is automatically applied if the finances appear insufficient. The balance mechanism is based on the ratio of assets to liabilities. When the ratio is below unity, it will slow down the indexation of both notional pension accounts and pension benefits. Thus the burden of adjustment will fall on replacement rates, but when and how, depends on what the demographic and economic future will contain. We apply the balance mechanism to the Finnish private-sector earnings-related pension system and simulate the future with stochastic population projections and asset yields. The results show that depending on the contribution rate level, a direct application of the balance mechanism may turn out to be a slow way of running down the system, or end up with huge funds. The problems may appear very far in the future. Scaling the bal...

This paper reflects on the ongoing challenges presented by certain employers who, whilst deducting occupational retirement fund contributions from their employees' salaries, fail to pay over those contributions to the relevant occupational retirement funds. These employers also often fail to register themselves or their employees as participating members of occupational retirement funds when they are supposed to. Such failures to register with the relevant occupational retirement funds and to pay over fund contributions have disastrous effects on the employees who are at the receiving end of these unlawful practices. This is the case because employees lose the value and use of their salaries through the deductions, and also the benefits of their occupational retirement funds.Although the Pension Funds Act 24 of 1956 is sufficiently responsive and provides adequate mechanisms to guide against this scourge, it is this paper's argument that occupational retirement funds themsel...

Demographic transition toward older populations is turning old age income support into an issue of high and growing importance throughout Asia. Population aging is most advanced in the sub-regions of East Asia and Southeast Asia. In this paper, we analyze the current state of public pension systems of China, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Our diagnosis of public pension systems reveals their main shortcomings. The key systemic weaknesses include low coverage and inadequate benefits. Overall, Asian public pension systems still have a long way to go in terms of affordable, adequate and sustainable old age economic security. We conclude the paper with policy recommendations for pension reform.

Rising elderly life expectancies imply the need to accumulate sufficient savings for retirement. This paper investigates the role of recent changes in the investment menu of the Singaporean Central Provident Fund (CPF) system. Our research explores the investment patterns of CPF participants and articulates their implications for policymakers. We find that most investors use their money for housing purchase and default the remainder to the CPF investment pool. The bulk of non-housing saving sits in bank accounts paying a low return. A fraction of workers does elect outside investment products, with high-income earners and males taking more risk than low-income earners and females. Since workers who default their money to the CPF fund receive a guaranteed 2.5% return on the Ordinary Account and 4% on the Special Account, hurdle rates for money market and equity funds are substantial. These high hurdle rates help explain why few CPF account holders invest outside the default governmen...

National defined contribution pension systems have long been a mainstay of retirement income in Asia. One of the oldest and best known of these systems is the Singaporean Central Provident Fund, a mandatory retirement scheme managed by the central government for almost a half-century. With required contribution rates that have ranged up to 50%, this program has powerfully shaped asset accumulation patterns and housing portfolios. This paper explores how the structure and design of the Singaporean retirement and housing schemes influence wealth levels and asset mix at retirement. Our model indicates that outcomes rest critically on the interlinked national retirement and housing programs. We show that policies to enhance one program may boost retirement replacement rates but can also lower total wealth in unexpected ways. The lessons we draw may serve as guidance for other countries constructing a national defined contribution retirement system.

Incomplete and highly fragmented work histories threaten to leave many contributors of the pension schemes in Latin America without the minimum pension guarantee or even without access to the ordinary pension. We propose a methodology to assess this risk, identify vulnerable groups and study potential determinants of the history of contributions using information from the work history records of the social security institutions. We apply this methodology to the largest social security institution of Uruguay, the Banco de Previsión Social (BPS), and show that the majority of contributors to this institution might not comply with the minimum number of years of contribution that is currently required to access an ordinary pension when they reach the retirement age.