This paper investigates the fiscal pressure from demographic change in relation to the labour marketspace for fifty countries that cover 75% of the world population. The pressure-to-space indicator ranks Poland, Turkey and Greece high. Apart from Turkey and India, developing countries rank low...

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...

Many countries face the problem of how to reform social security systems to cope with increasing life expectancy. This raises questions concerning both distribution and risk sharing across generations. These issues are addressed within an OLG model with stochastic life expectancy across...

Increasing longevity causes an upward trend in the dependency ratio in many countries. This raises concerns about the financial sustainability of social security schemes, and reform initiatives and proposals abound. It is shown that a fundamental policy choice inevitably arises since a given...

Faced with the need to adjust public pension systems to meet changing demographic, economic and social conditions, most developed countries have created government reserve funds to ensure macroeconomic sustainability. This paper aims to study the importance that this reserve fund plays in the...

This chapter provides a review of some implications of demographic shift arising from population aging for fiscal policy, taxation policy, and social security settings. The key implications of population aging that have been forthcoming from the many national and international macroeconomic...

In this paper we address the question how the generosity of the benefit rule of the German public pension system has changed during the past three decades and how this development can be explained by demographic changes. Firstly, we illustrate the political risk of benefit rule changes for...

In his seminal model (Feldstein, 1985), the government operates a social security system to counter the representative worker's myopia. (i) For a complete myope, he determined a sizable optimal tax rate (and the corresponding benefit level). (ii) For a partially shortsighted worker, he...

Differences in life expectancy between high and low socioeconomic groups are often large and have widened recently in many countries. Such longevity gaps affect the actuarial fairness and progressivity of public pension systems. However, behavioral responses to longevity and policy complicate...

This paper studies retirement and child support policies in a small, open, overlapping-generations economy with PAYG social security and endogenous retirement and fertility decisions. It demonstrates that neither fertility nor retirement choices necessarily coincide with socially optimal...