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We develop a pair of risk measures, health and mortality delta, for the universe of life and health insurance products. A life-cycle model of insurance choice simplifies to replicating the optimal health and mortality delta through a portfolio of insurance products. We estimate the model to explain the observed variation in health and mortality delta implied by the ownership of life insurance, annuities including private pensions, and long-term care insurance in the Health and Retirement Study. For the median household aged 51 to 57, the lifetime welfare cost of market incompleteness and suboptimal choice is 3.2% of total wealth.

This paper analyzes the performance of the Bulgarian private defined contribution pensions in the second and third pillars of the pension system.

All countries in the former transition economies of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe have undertaken public pension reforms of varying depth and orientation, often with the support of the World Bank. Although the reformed public pension schemes provide broad benefit adequacy, in most cases additional measures are needed to achieve fiscal sustainability in an aging society. 'Adequacy of Retirement Income after Pension Reforms in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe: Eight Country Studies' assesses the benefit adequacy of the reformed pension systems for eight countries—Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia—to identify policy gaps and options. The authors identify the motivations for reform against the backdrop of the trend toward multi-pillar arrangements, document key provisions, and compare them in the context of the World Bank's five-pillar paradigm for pension reform. They then evaluate the sustainability and adequacy of reformed pension systems and provide recommendations to address gaps and take advantage of opportunities for further reforms. The case studies and summary suggest the following broad policy conclusions: • Fiscal sustainability has improved in most study countries, but few are fully prepared for the inevitability of population aging. • The linkage between contributions and benefits has been strengthened, and pension system designs are better suited to market conditions • Levels of income replacement are generally adequate for all but some categories of workers (including those with intermittent formal sector employment or low lifetime wages), and addressing their needs requires initiatives that go beyond pension policy. • Further reforms should focus on extending labor force participation by the elderly to avoid benefit cuts that could undermine adequacy and very high contribution rates that could discourage formal sector employment. • More decisive financial market reforms are needed for funded provisions to deliver on the expectations of participants and keep funded pensions safe. This book will be of interest to policy makers, researchers, and everyone interested in the topic of pensions in the region, and beyond.

This paper discusses the key sources of vulnerabilities for pension plans and insurance companies in light of the global financial crisis of 2008. It also discusses how these institutional investors transit shocks to the rest of the financial sector and economy. The crisis has re-ignited the policy debate on key issues such as: 1) the need for countercyclical funding and solvency rules; 2) the tradeoffs implied in marked based valuation rules; 3) the need to protect contributors towards retirement from excessive market volatility; 4) the need to strengthen group supervision for large complex financial institutions including insurance and pensions; and 5) the need to revisit the resolution and crisis management framework for insurance and pensions.

This paper argues that the brunt of the reform-induced increase in Polish social expenditures has been borne by social insurance arrangements (mainly pensions and unemployment compensation) rather than by social assistance schemes targeted to the poor or more temporary social safety net schemes. This is largely due to ease of access to social security and its more attractive benefit structure. Much of recent social expenditure reform had an ad-hoc nature and was driven by the need to alleviate looming financial distress. A major policy challenge is to avoid a further burdening of social security by needs that should be addressed by basic income support and emergency assistance policies or by general transfers (e.g., family allowances). Current reform needs are illustrated by using unemployment benefits and pensions as examples.

The Chinese pension system is highly fragmented and decentralized, with governance standards, pension fund management practices, their regulation and supervision varying considerably both across the funded components of the Chinese pension system and across provinces. This paper describes the key components of the system, highlights the progress made to date and identifies remaining weaknesses, in regard to information disclosure, the governance framework and pension fund management standards.

This paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature: while most people know little about their own pension plans, retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives. We combine administrative and self-reported pension data to measure the retirement response to actual and perceived financial incentives and document an important role for self-reported pension data in determining retirement behavior. Well-informed individuals are far more responsive to pension incentives than the average individual. Ill-informed individuals seem to respond systematically to their own misperceptions of pension incentives.

Putting the pension system on a sustainable footing arguably remains the biggest challenge in Russia's economic policies. The debate about the policy options was hitherto constrained by the absence of general equilibrium analysis. This paper fills this gap by simulating their macroeconomic effects in a DSGE model calibrated to Russia's economy-the first of its kind to the best of our knowledge. The results suggest that a minimum benefit level in the public system should optimally be financed through lower government consumption, while higher taxation of labor and capital should be avoided. Reducing public investment spending is superior to increasing consumption taxes unless investment generates high rates of return.

In high-income countries, the percent of the population covered under mandatory old-age pension programs is typically high but often incomplete; in low- and middle-income countries, coverage is low and even stagnant. At the same time, older people are less able to rely on family and community support as a result of growing urbanization and migration. And low-income workers and the poor simply cannot save enough to prepare for their old age. As a response, many countries are considering or have already implemented various forms of retirement income transfers aiming to guarantee a minimum level of income during old age. Despite the growing popularity of these programs, research assessing their success has been limited. 'Closing the Coverage Gap: The Role of Social Pensions and Other Retirement Income Transfers' brings together a group of renowned academics, policy analysts, and policy makers working in the area of pensions and public policy. They discuss how social pensions and other retirement income transfers can be used to close the coverage gap of mandatory pension systems: how they operate, when they can be appropriate, and how to make them work. The book reviews the experiences of low-, middle-, and high-income countries with the design and implementation of retirement income transfers. The book analyzes design issues related to financing, incentives, targeting mechanisms, and administration, and also identifies the role of promising instruments such as matching contributions to reach parts of the informal sector.

This study finds that pension reforms in recent years have improved the efficiency and sustainability of pension systems in the new member states of the European Union and Croatia. However, for many countries, these probably have not gone far enough to ensure long-term sustainability, given the aging of the population. Reforms have included changes to Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) systems, including increases in retirement ages (not at least for women), new benefit formulas, and new indexation mechanism. Some countries (Latvia and Poland) have further strengthened the link of contributions and benefits to the sustainability of the PAYG system through the introduction of national defined contribution accounts. The link is strengthened also by moving to a point system, which has been adopted by many of the countries. Several countries have introduced a second, private, pension pillar, funded through diversion of part of the pension contributions, thereby diversifying risk. However, some countries (in particular the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Romania) will need to do more to safeguard the long-term viability of their pension systems, while others face challenges to ensure equitable pension systems and adequate living standards for all elderly people.