Documents defined contribution plan 6 results

"Since 1981 close to forty countries have introduced systemic pension reforms that have replaced all or part of prior pay-as-you-go (PAYG) schemes with privately managed funded defined contribution (FDC) pillars or systems. However, over the past decade about half of these countries have subsequently cutback on, or entirely eliminated, these FDC schemes. In this article we explore some of the reasons why this reversal is often taking place in developing countries. As part of our analysis we propose a new pension reform typology that goes beyond the commonly used dichotomy between PAYG and pension privatization. We identify and discuss four factors that are of particular relevance to those seeking to understand the pension policy reversals that have been taking place in many developing countries: low pension coverage and incentive incompatibility, triple burden costs, tradeoffs between pension reforms and social pensions, and difficulties with annuitization."

"Most countries have separate pension plans for public-sector employees. The future fiscal burden of these plans can be substantial as the government usually is the largest employer, pension promises in the public sector tend to be relatively generous, and future payments have to be paid out directly from government revenues (pay-as-you-go) or by funded plans (pension funds) which tend to be underfunded. The valuation and disclosure of these promises in some countries lacks transparency, which may hide potentially huge fiscal liabilities to be passed on to future generations of workers. In order to arrive at a fair comparison between countries regarding the fiscal burden of their public-sector pension plans, this article recommends that unfunded pension liabilities should be measured and reported according to a standard approach for reasons of fiscal transparency and better policy-making. From a sample of Member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the size of the net unfunded liabilities as of the end of 2008 is estimated in fair value terms. This fiscal burden can also be interpreted as the implicit pension debt in fair value terms."

"As some of the limitations of the traditional pay-as-you-go defined benefit public pension model have become more evident in recent years, pension experts have begun searching for alternative models. The notional defined contribution model, also financed on a pay-as-you-go basis, has emerged as one of the major new approaches. Drawing on evidence from schemes in six countries (Sweden, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Kyrgystan and Mongolia), this article aims to describe the notional defined contribution model and to review its strengths and limitations relative to the major alternatives, the pay-as-you-go defined benefit model and the funded defined contribution model. A four-pillar pension model is proposed."

"In 1998, the left-of-centre government of Hungary carved out a second-pillar mandatory private pension scheme from the original mono-pillar public system. Participation in the two-pillar system was optional for those who were already working, but mandatory for new entrants to the workforce. About 50 per cent of the workforce joined the second pillar voluntarily and another 25 per cent were mandated to do so by law between 1999 and 2010. The second pillar has not improved the financial stability of the social security system. Moreover, the international financial and economic crisis has highlighted the transition costs that are associated with moving, even if only partially, to a system of pre-funding. In 2010, the conservative government de facto “nationalized” the second pillar, and it is to use part of the accumulated pension capital to reduce Hungary's excessive public debt and annual budget deficit and to compensate for income tax reductions."

"From 1981 to 2007, more than thirty countries worldwide fully or partially replaced their pre-existing pay-as-you-go pension systems with ones based on individual, private savings accounts in a process often labelled “pension privatization”. After the global financial crisis, this trend was put on hold for economic, ideational, and institutional reasons, despite a rise in critical indebtedness that has facilitated pension privatization in the past. Is the global trend towards pension privatization dead or in the process of being reborn, perhaps in a somewhat different form? Several recent trends point to rebirth as policy-makers scale back public and private pension systems, attend to minimum pensions and “nudge” rather than mandate people to save for retirement."