Friday, September 18, 2009

Linking pensions to longevity

The OECD has issued an interesting working paper Life-Expectancy Risk and Pensions: Who Bears the Burden?, which looks into a number of OECD countries' relatively recent policy changes to share part of the longevity risk with pensioners. Given the proportions of the risk and the massive inter-generational skew in cost/benefit, this is perfectly reasonable and should be adopted universally.

For some undisclosed reason, Switzerland is virtually omitted from the scope of the analysis, even though there clearly is no linkage between longevity risk and pensions whatsoever. In the Swiss three pillar system, longevity risk is borne in the first pillar by the tax payer, by employers in the second, and by individuals in the third pillar.

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