Over the next four decades, increasing old-age dependency ratios exert an enormous upward pressure on welfare spending in most developed countries. As this is mainly due to existing unfunded public pension schemes, many countries have embarked on far-reaching reforms in this area, strengthening...

Public pay-as-you-go pensions still form the dominant pillar of old-age provision in Germany. This is in marked contrast to the situation in Anglo-Saxon countries. It has advantages if labour markets are strong, e.g., following a quick recovery from the Great Recession. It has disadvantages, as...

The Croatian system of old-age provision comprises a traditional public pay-as-you-go scheme and a mandatory funded scheme (“second pillar”) that will provide increasing amounts of supplementary pensions to those entering retirement in the future. Due to the continuing economic crisis, the...

How much retirement income is needed in order to maintain one's living standard at old age? As it is difficult to find a firm basis for an empirical treatment of this question, we employ a novel approach to assessing an adequate replacement rate vis-à-vis income in the pre-retirement period. We...

Since its inception, the traditional form of providing survivor benefits within public pension schemes has lost much of its legitimacy. As a result of fundamental changes in marriage behaviour and the typical division of labour between married spouses, offering noncontributory benefits of this...

In this paper, I demonstrate that an indicator which is commonly used to assess the long-term fiscal sustainability of public finances in EU member states (“S2”) is also defined if government borrowing rates are assumed to be permanently lower than the growth rate of GDP. I illustrate this...

Slower growth of the labour force and an increase in old-age dependency will reduce the growth of aggregate output and output per capita in many developed countries. However, a major question is whether there is any systematic link between demographics and the productivity of those who will...

Central bank independence (CBI) is a very important precondition for price stability. However, the empirical evidence for a correlation between both is relatively weak. In this paper, this weakness is countered with a) an extended measure of monetary commitment, which includes well-known...