Explore the vast range of titles available.

The past decade has brought an increasing recognition to the importance of pension systems to the economic stability of nations and the security of their aging populations. During this time, the World Bank has taken a leading role in addressing this challenge through its support for pension reforms around the world. Old-Age Income Support in the 21st Century attempts to explain current policy thinking and update the World Bank’s perspective on pension reform. The Bank has been involved in pension reforms in nearly 60 countries, and the demand for its support continues to grow. This book incorporates lessons learned from recent Bank experiences and research that have significantly increased knowledge and insight regarding how best to proceed in the future. The book has a comprehensive introduction and two main parts. Part I presents the conceptual underpinnings for the Bank’s thinking on pension systems and reforms, including structure of Bank lending in this area. Part II highlights key design and implementation issues where it signals areas of confidence and areas for further research and experience, and includes a section on regional reform experiences, including Latin American and Europe and Central Asia. This book will be of interest to Bank clients, the international community, and anyone interested in pension systems and reform.

In recent decades, many European governments have passed pension reforms to incentivise participation in private pension plans. However, we still have minimal understanding of whether participation in such plans is concentrated in certain groups or spread uniformly across society, or what their stability over time is. To illuminate the social selectivity of these plans and potential changes in that selectivity over time, we analyse six waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) in ten European countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Specifically, we focus on participation gaps in individual and occupational plans of workers across six dimensions: gender, education, age, social class, income, and risk preference. The results indicate large and persistent social divides in participation rates. As expected, rates are significantly higher among workers who are not close to retirement, those with an upper service occupation and those with high income. Importantly, these divides did not shrink significantly over the period considered – 2006 to 2021. Social selectivity is not consistently smaller in contexts of more mature private pension provision, whereas it is consistently smaller in countries with more generous public pensions.

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.

With the aim of probing into the life satisfaction of retired urban elderly in China with respect to old age support systems, this study examines the effect of pension reform with its existing inequalities across demographic and social groups on the life satisfaction of retired urban residents. The complementary role of intergenerational assistance and self-support on the life satisfaction of beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries of the pension scheme was analyzed using an ordered logit regression model with 2015 national representative data from China’s Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey. Our sample consists of a cross-sectional data set of 3815 retired urban elderly aged 60 and above. The empirical results depict that though enjoying benefits from the public pension scheme generally enhances life satisfaction, beneficiaries of the Government and Institution Pension and Enterprise Employee Basic Pension are more advantaged than beneficiaries under the Urban-Rural Social Pension Scheme. The pension inequalities existing at provincial levels and across social groups such as gender and residence registration status also affect life satisfaction adversely. Women and rural ‘Hukou’ registered retired urban residents are at an apparent disadvantage. Getting financial and emotional support from children broadly improves life satisfaction. Non-beneficiaries of the public pension benefit more from the financial support of children than public pension beneficiaries. There is also a positive effect of cohabiting with children on life satisfaction when retired urban residents are single as compared to being married. Financial and physical self-support ability in forms of good health, home ownership and wealth management enhance life satisfaction significantly. However, largely, retired urban elderly have a higher life satisfaction when they are financially independent of children and are supported by state pension schemes. Our findings indicate that self-support ability of the elderly together with pension benefits are more effective in enhancing the life satisfaction of retired urban elderly in China. It is recommended that government institute policies to promote personal finance initiatives by the elderly while improving the pension scheme and reducing pension inequality.

Incorporating more informal workers into the employee public pension scheme (EPPS) is a crucial component of building a high-quality employment security system in China. This study, based on data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) for the years 2014, 2016, and 2018, empirically analyzes the impact of Internet usage on the participation of informal workers in the EPPS. The research finds that informal workers significantly increase the possibility of participation in the EPPS through the Internet usage. This positive effect remains significant even after a series of robustness tests. Heterogeneity analyses argue that informal workers with higher educational level are more likely to participate in employee public pension scheme through the Internet Usage than informal workers with lower educational level. Mechanism analysis suggests that informal workers significantly raise their government trust through the Internet usage, thereby promoting their participation in the EPPS. Based on the empirical results, the following policy recommendations are proposed: government should further utilize the Internet to streamline online enrollment procedures, reducing the time costs for informal workers to participate in the EPPS. Additionally, the government should actively engage with the public through the Internet to enhance its image and deepen the level of government trust of informal workers, thereby increasing their motivation to participate in the EPPS.

How does a social pension scheme affect farm production? This study addresses this question by investigating the effect of social pension on farm production by taking Urban and Rural Residents Pension Scheme (URRPS) in China as an illustration. Based on the implementation of the policy before and after the unification of URRPS, this paper uses the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey (CHARLS) in 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2018 and conducts an analytical framework of the difference-in-difference model. The results show that, although the impact of URRPS on labor productivity is not significant, the pension income of URRPS significantly improves the land productivity of elderly farmers. Furthermore, the land productivity effect is larger for male farmers. This paper reveals the certain role played by pension scheme in promoting farm production, providing insights on alleviating the pressure of farm production brought by agricultural labor aging.

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.

Pension schemes all over the world are under increasing pressure to efficiently hedge longevity risk imposed by ageing populations. In this work, we study an optimal investment problem for a defined contribution pension scheme that decides to hedge longevity risk using a mortality-linked security, typically a longevity bond. The pension scheme promises a minimum guarantee which allows the members to purchase lifetime annuities upon retirement. The scheme manager invests in the risky and riskless assets available on the market, including the longevity bond. We transform the corresponding constrained optimal investment problem into a single investment portfolio optimization problem by replicating future contributions from members and the minimum guarantee provided by the scheme. We solve the resulting optimization problem using the dynamic programming principle. Through a series of numerical studies, we show that the longevity risk has an important impact on the investment strategy performance. Our results add to the growing evidence supporting the use of mortality-linked securities for efficient hedging of longevity risk.

We consider accumulative defined contribution pension schemes with a lump sum payment on retirement. These schemes differ in relation to inheritance and provide various decrement factors. For each scheme, we construct the balance equation and obtain an expression for calculation of gross premium. Payments are made at the end of the insurance event period (survival to retirement age or death or retirement for disability within the accumulation interval). A simulation model was developed to analyze the constructed schemes.