This book examines recent changes in the landscape of retirement products and annuity markets in five countries. All the selected countries (Australia, Chile, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland) have mandatory or quasi-mandatory savings schemes. But they also exhibit significant differences in the...

The report covers several types of structured finance with such capital market instruments as mortgage-backed securities, structured bond issues for infrastructure financing, securitization of small and medium enterprises (SME)-related assets, and securitization of loans to SMEs. The report also...

This paper discusses the mechanics and regulation of participating and unit-linked variable payout annuities. These annuities offer benefits that are not fixed in either nominal or real terms but depend on the performance of the fund or funds in which the underlying reserve assets are invested,...

This paper provides a comparative summary of the payout phase of pension systems in five countries -- Australia, Chile, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland. All five countries have large pension systems with mandatory or quasi-mandatory retirement savings schemes. But they exhibit important...

This paper examines the policy issues, constraints and options facing policymakers in promoting the development of sound markets for retirement products. It discusses the various risks faced by pensioners and the risk characteristics of alternative retirement products and also reviews the risks...

Over the past decade or so, most Central and Eastern European countries have reformed their pension systems, significantly downsizing their public pillars and creating private pillars based on capitalization accounts. Early policy attention was focused on the accumulation phase but several...

Public pension funds have the potential to benefit from low operating costs because they enjoy economies of scale and avoid large marketing costs. But this important advantage has in most countries been dissipated by poor investment performance. The latter has been attributed to a weak...

The Danish ATP (Arbejdmarkedets TillaegsPension or Labor Market Supplementary Pension) fund is a public pension fund that was created in 1964 to complement the universal pension benefit that is financed from general tax revenues and is paid to all old-age residents. When it was created,...

The dramatic events of the late 1990s, which followed a wave of financial crises going back to the early 1980s, brought to center stage the issue of financial sector policy in developing countries. Many recent books have presented a chronology and interpretation of the crises, but it is little...