Concern about the long-term sustainability of European public pension systems has been a permanent feature for decades due to the unstoppable ageing of the population, but demographic change is not the only factor of concern. A deep economic and financial crisis has been added to this structural...

In this chapter, we analyse the effects of PAYG and funded pension systems on welfare. The debate on the choice between alternative systems focuses on their effects on savings, capital accumulation, labour supply, economic growth and inequality and the potential benefits of mixed systems in...

The aim of this chapter is to review the main instruments and indicators used to measure the sustainability of PAYG pension systems. It will distinguish between defined contribution and defined benefit systems, due to the various implications that each of them has. It will also be necessary to...

Pensions are the main source of income in old age. Their main value is provided, in most countries, by public pension systems. Therefore, one of the main challenges for governments and policymakers is to enable people to smooth consumption over the life cycle in an appropriate scale. This...

Retirement systems across the world are undergoing major reforms to adapt to continuously changing economic and demographic factors. Among these major changes are the so-called notional defined contribution pension schemes (NDCs), first developed about 20 years ago in countries such as Italy,...

Maintaining retirement systems stability is nowadays a big challenge for all countries. Such sustainability is widely related to a set of time-varying elements that include population structure, longevity, employment, and affiliation to social security. For the case of Algeria, public retirement...

In classical pension design, there are essentially two kinds of pension schemes: Defined Benefit (DB) and Defined Contribution (DC) plans. Each scheme corresponds to a different philosophy of spreading risk between the stakeholders: in a DB, the main risks are taken by the organizer of the plan,...

In pay-as-you go pension systems, automatic balancing mechanisms (ABMs) are designed to face adverse demographic and economic changes. In this respect, ABMs can be defined as a set of pre-determined measures established by law to be applied immediately as required according to an indicator that...

Recent reforms of public pension systems implemented in various countries, including Spain, have sought to ensure the sustainability of benefits. However, achieving a structural budget balance (i.e. long-run equality between income and expenditure) may result in a decrease in the replacement...

The literature has addressed the problem of pensions and has reached an almost unanimous conclusion that increased longevity is the main cause of the problem. However, in our opinion, longevity itself is not a problem and, therefore, should not be the cause of the problem of pensions. The real...