This paper analyses whether the severe demographic change in Germany causes its high current account surpluses. An ageing population both increases the supply and lowers demand of capital in an economy. Due to a longer life span individuals save more. Fewer workers reduce the optimal capital...

Continuous longevity improvements and population ageing have led countries to modify national public pension schemes by increasing the standard and early retirement ages in a discretionary, scheduled, or automatic way, and by making it harder for people to retire prematurely. To this end,...

Several European countries are currently considering reversing parts of their pension reforms that were adopted previously to improve sustainability. In this paper we present a framework that allows us to quantify the macroeconomic and fiscal costs of such reversals. We thereby integrate the...