An understanding of the financial and distributional consequences of Social Security reform requires knowledge about the actual life circumstances of participants, including the level and pattern of their lifetime earnings and when they retire. Some analyses of Social Security reform make...

Pakistan’s pension system is in the process of increasing funding in anticipation of providing for a growing elderly population. The pension assets are mainly invested domestically, as it was just in January 2007 that regulations changed to allow the purchase of international assets. In this...

Many countries are currently increasing the advanced funding of their public pension systems to improve their sustainability in the face of rapidly aging populations. When pensions are funded, the issue of asset allocation becomes of paramount importance. Standard portfolio selection theory...

The aim of the study is to analyse the consequences of the changing structure of the labour market for the social security system. It will be shown that in the future the restructuring of the labour force will yield a main challenge for social policy and will have much bigger consequences for...

The debate on the reform of the pension system in Spain is not very lively, in contrast with the international experience. The Spanish economic boom since the mis nineties, the slowdown in the number of pensioners due to the retirement of the cohorts born during the Civil War, and the...

This article analyses the dynamics of an overlapping generations economy (Diamond, 1965) with pay-as-you-go financed public pensions and myopic expectations. It is shown that large PAYG pensions triggers economic fluctuations depending on the mutual relationship between technology and preference...

In this new version of the database we have included pilot social assistance programmes. A number of pilot cash transfer programmes have been introduced in Latin America, Asia and Africa in the last year or so, and a few more are in the design stage. Their scale and rationale suggest there is a...

The paper analyzes the issue of the financial sustainability of the Italian Pension System in the long-run, by discussing the main reforms occurred in the last few years and by examining some recent data: in particular, the data of the Italian Agency for the Evaluation of Social Security...

The European Union coordinates and encourages Member State actions to combat poverty, and to reform their social protection systems on the basis of policy exchanges and mutual learning (‘best practices’). Some EU countries are more effective in poverty reduction than others. What can explain...

Poverty alleviation is an important objective of European countries and of the United States. If these ‘rich’ states offer elaborate systems of income maintenance, why is there still a considerable amount of poverty? And why are anti-poverty outcomes so different in the United States...