If Europe wants to fulfill it’s Lisbon agenda of catching up with the United States, it must overhaul its pension systems and introduce some form or other of private pension funds, which are a major force in financing technological advance in the capitalist world economy today. Our...

This research paper compares the cross national effects of pension reform on 33 indicators of social, economic, political and ecological well-being of nations with the effects on these 33 variables by dependency, the adherence to the advice by international financial institutions, world...

This paper analyzes a social security policy with public debt in an overlapping generations growth model. In particular, the paper considers a situation in which population aging causes a heavy burden of social security payments where public debt is issued by the government to finance the...

By analysing pension reforms in three Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland and Sweden that apply different institutional solutions in their old-age security programmes – the paper argues that the political processes that shaped the country-specific pension set-ups in the 1950s and 1960s had...

This paper provides an overview and survey of selected literature on two economic topics that have recently been subject to much academic debate. First, the effects of demographic change on financial markets and secondly, the role of financial intermediaries in promoting economic growth. This...

In this paper, the latter-day Swedish pension reform of the 1990s is studied from a power-political perspective focusing on the involvement of the Social Democratic Party. <p> Few episodes in the history of Swedish social democracy have been as widely celebrated as the struggles of the 1950s over...</p>

Ageing puts a strain on most countries’ pension systems; forecasts show them to be more or less unsustainable. Evidence from social choice research, theoretical as well as empirical, does not seem to offer a way out of the dilemma, as the median voter will resist a reform. Despite this, Sweden...

This paper presents a unified analytical framework for the analysis of social security reform. It discusses reform along two dimensions: Pay-As-You-Go versus fully funded on the one hand, and actuarial versus non-actuarial on the other. Making the system more actuarial entails a trade-off...

Keeping public finances on a sustainable foundation while the population ages is clearly a problem in Finland, as in many other western countries. The shrinking of the working-age population, ageing of the labour force, and growth in the number of very old persons form a difficult combination...

This paper simulates a set of proposed policies from the Norwegian pension reform within a structural dynamic model of health and retirement estimated on the Norwegian labour market data. The paper focuses on the two main elements of the reform, namely the new pension entitlement accrual rules...