Comparisons of the economic position of single older women in various industrialized countries have shown substantial differences, especially regarding the proportion of widows, divorcees, and never-married women experiencing poverty. This review aims at a comparative assessment of existing...

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...

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...

Canada was very late in establishing a comprehensive retirement security system - lagging roughly thirty five years after the US built its Social Security system and about eighty years after Bismark first established a state funded pension system in Germany. As a consequence, the reduction in...

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...

Aging involves not one but several transitions. People move from working to not working, from relying upon labor income to relying on transfers. They also tend to live in smaller households, not only because any children will have moved away but also because, at some stage, a spouse dies. People...

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...