Retirement timing is an issue of great political importance these days. Policy-makers develop various initiatives encouraging workers to postpone retirement beyond the statutory retirement age. This effort brings, however, just minimal outcomes. Although increasing opportunities and abilities to work in old age, in some countries people tend to retire as soon as it is possible. In economic terms, they make suboptimal (irrational) decisions.

This paper evaluates alternative reforms of the public pension system in an overlapping generations model for an open economy facing demographic change. We make progress compared to existing literature on pension reform by modelling individuals with heterogeneous innate ability and endogenous human capital, and by putting (the reduction of) welfare inequality effects of reform at the centre. Frequently adopted reforms such as an increase of the normal retirement age or a decrease of the pension benefit can guarantee financial sustainability, but they fail when the objective is also to avoid intergenerational or intragenerational welfare inequality. Our results prefer a reform which combines an increase of the retirement age with an intelligent linkage between the pension benefit and earlier labour earnings. First, this design conditions pension benefits on past individual labour income, with a high weight on labour income earned when older and a low weight on labour income earned when young. Second, this linkage is complemented by a strong rise in the benefit replacement rate for low ability individuals (and a reduction for high ability individuals).

Pension policy is a highly political issue across Latin America. Since the mid-2000s, several countries have re-reformed their pension systems with a general trend toward more state involvement, yet with significant variation. This article contends that policy legacies and the institutional political setting are key to understanding such variation. Analyzing the cases of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, this article shows that where a weak legacy, characterized by low coverage and savings rates, a weakly organized pension industry, and strong societal groups that oppose the private system, combines with a strong institutional setting, characterized by a government with large support in Congress and where the president concentrates decisionmaking, re-reform outcomes may lead to the outright elimination of the private pillar. Conversely, where a strong legacy combines with a weak institutional setting, re-reform outcomes will tend to maintain the private pillar and expand only the role of the public one.

We investigate how labour market and pension measures associated with active ageing influence retirement behaviour in Austria and Germany. We focus on two conservative welfare states and evaluate how individuals respond to comparable pension scheme changes. Using the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, findings point to increasing average actual retirement ages in both countries. Early retirement becomes less important while working until pension age has gained in significance. In particular, findings point towards greater de-standardisation of retirement transitions, though to a different extent across the two countries. Whereas gender differences are still prevalent in Austria, in line with traditional conservative welfare state characteristics, we find that Germany exhibits lower gender differences, but instead displays stronger inequalities between education groups. We argue that social risks emerge in Germany that are usually found in liberal welfare states. We suggest that this trend is reinforced by retirement policies that focus on “pushing” individuals out of employment. This study contributes to the understanding of how individuals respond to national policy incentives when making retirement transitions.

The legitimacy of a pension system or any social security program depends on its credibility and perceived fairness. In order to gauge this legitimacy, we need to understand the relation between people's knowledge and attitudes. This experimental survey into the role of knowledge and perceptions divided respondents into two groups: the ‘treatment’ group received an information letter about a forthcoming pension reform before they were interviewed, while the control group was interviewed without receiving this ‘treatment’. Comparisons of the responses from the two groups allow us to assess how the level of knowledge and the provision of information affect people's opinions on policy reform. We also consider the patterns of covariation between background factors, people's concerns, and attitudes toward pension reform. The results show that the information letter had a significant impact on subjective but not on the objective level of knowledge. Receiving the information letter improved acceptance and perceptions of the fairness of the reform.

This article looks at how retirement timing is changing in Italy. A first aim is descriptive and it is to identify recent trends in retirement age, following the pension reform. Then the focus is on factors which may favour or hinder the extension of the working career of older workers. They are studied by looking at the reasons for retirement, introducing the distinction between voluntary and involuntary retirement, and some predictors of retirement. Some of them relate to the work history of individuals, in particular the stability/instability of careers due to episodes of unemployment. The level of education and gender, two variables that may affect the employability of older workers, have also been considered. The study is based on a longitudinal analysis (Kaplan–Meier survival estimates of transition to retirement and binomial logit discrete-time model for the analysis of retirement predictors) of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) Job Episodes Panel data. They refer to a sample of 1,999 individuals born between 1911 and 1959. Although the various pension reforms initiated in Italy in the 1990s have not yet been fully implemented, retirement age is rising, even in the case of involuntary retirement. Regarding work history, the advantages of a working career with a small number of unemployment episodes emerge from the study.

This article examines public attitudes towards two reform options for the defined-contribution (DC) Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF) scheme in Hong Kong: (i) increasing MPF contributions; or (ii) introducing a universal pension partly funded by switching MPF contributions to the universal pension. Drawing on a phone survey conducted with 975 active contributors to the MPF, we examine whether agreement with these MPF reform options can be explained by respondents’ self-interest, attachment to different welfare ideologies, their level of confusion with the MPF, uncertainty about future MPF income, and trust in the Hong Kong government to deal with MPF issues. This research identifies that it is uncertainty with future MPF income and low trust in the Hong Kong government to deal with MPF issues that have the most significant effect on respondents’ MPF reform preferences. Mainstream accounts of the effect of liberalist, universalist, conservative, and familistic welfare ideologies are only partially confirmed.

Due to structural and policy shifts, pension deficit in North Macedonia doubled over a decade and significantly outpaced the central budget deficit. The objective of the paper is to examine fiscal and development effects of few pension-reform designs. We constructed MK-PENS Dynamic Microsimulation Pension Model and simulated the effects of few reforms affecting one stakeholder and few combined reforms. Results robustly suggest that without reform and assuming only statutory pension adjustment, the deficit will remain as is. Simulated scenarios suggest that proposed pension reforms significantly reduce the pension deficit, with the most favourable results obtained within the combined scenarios of shared burden. Gradual introduction of reform's elements should come into play in case large political cost is envisaged.

Drawing on the literature on federalism and public policy, the present article explores the recent politics of two highly-similar and closely integrated Canadian public pension programs created in the mid-1960s: the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and the Quebec Pension Plan (QPP). This article argues that the parallel evolution of CPP/QPP can be understood by examining how the unique jurisdictional arrangements for the CPP/QPP interacted with other factors to generate by these linked programs have led to the emergence of specific federalism policy dynamics, while muting or foreclosing other potential policy dynamics. As shown, governments have engaged in a process of ‘collusive benchmarking’ that has limited the scope of the available policy options. Differing demographic trends in Quebec and the ‘Rest of Canada’ have strained but also reinforced this policymaking dynamic in recent years. Simultaneously, intergovernmental race to the top dynamics have facilitated the recent push for both CPP and, later, QPP expansion.

Latin American pension reforms during the 1990s dramatically increased the number of people in the region who had a direct stake in the returns on financial capital. This article asks: How, if at all, has this expansion affected Latin American politics? It focuses particularly on popular attitudes towards neoliberalism. It argues that government-induced expansions of capital ownership do not directly affect public preferences about neoliberalism, but did so indirectly by shaping the information that people use to judge whether neoliberalism is welfare enhancing. According to this view, participation in a reformed Latin American pension system should lead to acceptance of neoliberalism when pensions returns are high, but have the opposite effect when returns are low. This study analyzes multiple datasets of Latin American survey data and finds support for this theory.

We describe the points system as proposed by the Belgian Commission for Pension Reform 2020–2040. Intragenerational equity can be realised through the allocation of points within a cohort. The intergenerational distribution is determined by fixing the value of a point for the newly retired and a sustainability parameter for the actual retirees. The value of the point links pensions to the average living standard of the employed population. We propose an automatic adjustment mechanism, in which a key role is played by the career length. This mechanism induces a balanced distribution of the burden of demographic and economic shocks over the different cohorts.

Economists typically argue population ageing generates fiscal pressures by restricting the tax base while increasing demands for social spending. Alongside other economic pressures associated with neoliberalism, this dynamic contributes to a politics of ‘enduring austerity’ that limits governments’ fiscal discretion. The politics of population ageing reflects modelling techniques, such as generational accounting (GA), which, anticipating future deficits, create demands for policy action today to address projected intergenerational inequalities. Taking Australia as a case study, this paper explores the politics of GA in public budgetary processes. While existing critiques reject GA by arguing it relies on ‘apocalyptic’ or unreliable demography, we focus on a different kind of contestation, which applies the techniques and even the categories of GA to frame different problems and promote different solutions. We identify three sites of partisan contest that refocus fiscal modelling: including the tax side of the budget equation; comparing the cost of public provision to public subsidies for private programmes; and including the costs of environmental damage. At each site, the future-orientated logic of GA is mobilised to contest the policy implications of austerity. This complicates analysis that financialisation and neoliberalism necessarily ‘de-politicise’ policy by removing state discretion. Instead, we identify an increasingly important, if technocratic, form of political contestation that offers the possibility to promote more egalitarian responses to population ageing.

There is growing concern surrounding the retraction of disability social provisioning measures across the western world, with state fiscal policy trends foregrounding austerity as a central principle of welfare provisioning. This is occurring within many of the nation-states that have ratified and legislated rights enshrined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). This article undertakes a critical analysis of disability income retraction in Australia since the early 2000s and examines these changes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians living with disability by focusing on Article 20 of the CRPD, the right to personal mobility, a core right for people with disabilities and Indigenous peoples. Beyond economic inequality, the article illustrates that the various administrative processes attached to welfare retraction have implications for the realisation of mobility practices that are critical for individual cultural identity and wellbeing. Disability austerity has resulted in a new form of Indigenous containment, fixing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with disabilities in a cyclical motion of poverty management.

This special issue on financial knowledge and retirement security builds on prior studies in this journal on the economic causes and consequences of financial literacy for retirement security.

In the wake of the economic downturn of 2008–2009, researchers and policymakers have focused considerable attention on the extent of unfunded liabilities in US public sector pension plans and the implications for the long term fiscal sustainability of state and local governments. In response to the growth in liabilities, many states have introduced legislation that cuts back on defined benefit (DB) plan commitments, in some cases even shifting the pension system from a DB to a defined contribution or hybrid plan. This paper explores the factors that have led states to engage in pension reform, focusing particular attention on one factor that has only recently gained attention in the research literature: contribution volatility. While unfunded liabilities have significant long-term solvency implications, in the short term fluctuations in the amount of required contributions pose substantial difficulties for the ability of plan sponsors to balance budgets and engage in strategic planning. We begin by quantifying the volatility in the required contributions US states were expected to make between 2001 and 2013 and comparing the volatility of pension spending to other relevant tax and spending measures. Next, we describe the various types of pension reforms that states have implemented and examine the fiscal pressures facing those states that have engaged in reform. States with greater fluctuations in their required payments have been more likely to reduce benefits and increase employee contributions; they have also been more likely to institute these reforms sooner.

We conduct two randomized control trials designed to understand the role of information and priming on the willingness to retrench the pension system. The first entails a survey to a sample of Portuguese voters, who are randomly presented with a text providing factual information about the public pension system. The second surveys a sample of Portuguese University students, randomly presented with an alternative order of questions. We show that more literacy on the pension system has a positive impact on the individual willingness to support reforms. Given that public opinion is usually seen as an important deterrent of effective action by politicians and that the level of voters’ literacy can be influenced by policy action, this analysis may provide useful insights to policy makers faced with the challenge of reforming existent pension systems. Our analysis also suggests that priming effects should not be ignored, given their impact in individuals in the extremes of the political spectrum.