Pension Shock

• Author: Mauricio Soto

Pension Shock Finance & Development, June 2017, Vol. 54, No. 2

Mauricio Soto

Young adults in advanced economies must take steps to increase their retirement income security

Public pensions have played a crucial role in ensuring retirement income security over the past few decades. But for the millennial generation coming of working age now, the prospect is that public pensions won’t provide as large a safety net as they did to earlier generations. As a result, millennials should take steps to supplement their retirement income.

Pensions and other types of public transfers have long been an important source of income for the elderly, accounting for more than 60 percent of their income in countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Pensions also reduce poverty. Without them, poverty rates among those over 65 also would be much higher in advanced economies.

Pressure on pensionsBut pensions are also costly to provide. Government spending on pensions has been increasing in advanced economies from an average of 4 percent of GDP in 1970 to close to 9 percent in 2015—largely reflecting population aging (see Chart 1, left panel).

Population aging puts pressure on pension systems by increasing the ratio of elderly beneficiaries to younger workers, who typically contribute to funding these benefits. The pressure on retirement systems is exacerbated by increasing longevity—life expectancy at age 65 is projected to increase by about one year a decade.

To deal with the costs of aging, many countries have initiated significant pension reforms, aiming largely at containing the growth in the number of pensioners—typically by increasing retirement ages or tightening eligibility rules—and reducing the size of pensions, usually by adjusting benefit formulas. Since the 1980s, public pension expenditure per elderly person as a percent of income per capita—the so-called economic replacement rate—has been about 35 percent. But that replacement rate is projected to decline to less than 20 percent by 2060 (see Chart 1, right panel).

This means that younger generations will have to work longer and save more for retirement to achieve replacement rates similar to those of today’s retirees (see Chart 2):

Working longer: To close the gap in the economic replacement rate relative to today’s retirees, one option for younger individuals is to lengthen their productive work lives. For those born between 1990 and 2009...