Financial and Demographic Risk Impact on Private Pay-as-You-Go Pension System : The Italian Case

The aim of this paper is to analyze private pension systems financed by pay-as-you-go, with a focus on the pension funds of the Italian Professional Orders. The research centres on the financial and demographic risks and on their impact on the future evolution of the fund. It presents a model to investigate the dynamics of these types of pension funds which operate according to the pay-as-you-go rule: the two stochastic variables global asset return and new entrants variation rate are modelled by autoregressive processes. The numerical applications carried out, using the data provided by the Italian Chartered Accountants' pension fund, show that the rate of variation of new entrants has a higher influence on the evolution of the fund with respect to the global asset return, despite the considerable invested wealth. Some proposal are developed to face the demographic "extinction risk" of the insured professional category