One of the strongest objections to personal pension plans is that they transfer investment risk to individual workers, who are then exposed to the vagaries of equity and bond markets. Using historical United States data, the authors investigate the impact of the volatility of investment returns...

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 link between pension reform, and capital market development, has become a perennial question, raised every time the potential benefits, and pre-conditions of pension reform are discussed. The author asks two questions. First, what are the basic"feasibility"pre-conditions for the successful...

Mauritius belongs to a select group of developing countries where contractual savings-savings with insurance companies and pension funds-exceed 40 percent of GDP and represent a major potential force in the local financial system. Pension funds account for 75 percent of contractual savings....

Most countries reforming their pension system, focus more on the accumulation phase, than on the decumulation (pay-out), because the number of beneficiaries is likely to be small initially, especially if older workers are discouraged from joining the new system. Policymakers place a priority on...

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the growing use of derivatives by Danish pension institutions as a risk management tool to hedge embedded options on their balance sheets. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s it was a widespread practice for Danish pension institutions to guarantee a...

The Jordanian insurance market has been free from extensive state ownership and pervasive premium, product, investment, and reinsurance controls. However, these positive features have been marred by the licensing of a large number of private companies, often on political rather than professional...

Institutional investors comprise pension funds, insurance companies, and mutual funds. Should a country promote their creation if it lacks well-developed securities markets? The answer to this question, says the author, varies by type of investor. He argues that private pension funds and...

Social pension systems in most countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union face severe financial pressure. Aging populations are increasing that pressure, which stems mainly from in the%design in the %in the flaws and incompatible incentives in the systems. The authors describe the...

The insurance industry is relatively well developed. It makes extensive use of reinsurance facilities and is free from the pervasive premium, product, investment, and reinsurance controls that have bedeviled the insurance markets of so many developing countries around the world. Total premiums...