It is increasingly clear that the United States has adopted a strategic goal to shift federally-funded entitlement programs from a defined benefit to a defined cost basis. A cross-national comparison, this paper discusses the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and its probable effect on other federal...

Problems of the systems for protecting the elderly have become pressing on a world wide scale albeit for different reasons. In many industrialized countries with mature systems the share of GDP that is redistributed via the mandatory pension system is criticized as being too high. High...

This article starts by discussing the two (semi-collective) layers of the pension system in the Netherlands separately. Then, the Belgian pension system will be discussed. Apart from the cost of the pension system (which will only be discussed very briefly), comparison of the pension systems...

The purpose of this paper is to review the recent evidence on the antipoverty effectiveness and other characteristics of income maintenance systems for the elderly in the rich nations of the world. As we move toward Social Security reform in the United States, we do so knowing that a...

First considered, at a point in time, is how cross-country differences in the mix of income sources are related to three measures of economic well-being. Poverty, defined as 50 percent of mean-adjusted household income; relative adjusted disposable income of aged households with heads over 55...

This paper surveys a dozen international comparative studies of poverty, income distribution and older people in industrialized countries using data up to the mid-1990s. It addresses a series of questions. At what level are the incomes of the elderly relative to the population as a whole? How...

In der Oktober-Umfrage des Ökonomenpanels wurden Professoren der Volkswirtschaftslehre zur Zukunft des deutschen Rentensystems befragt. Anlass hierzu war die Forderung von Finanzminister Olaf Scholz, das aktuelle Rentenniveau auch über das Jahr 2025 hinaus auf dem aktuellen Niveau zu...

Im November 2018 verabschiedete der Bundestag ein Rentenpaket, das Anfang Januar 2019 in Kraft trat und für Vertrauen in die Stabilität der Rente sorgen soll. Festgelegt wurde unter anderem eine »doppelte Haltelinie« – die bis 2025 gelten soll –, für das Rentenniveau einerseits und für...