This paper explores how EU countries can address various challenges (including the aging of the population) affecting their systems of old-age income support. It presents two scenarios illustrating the most important uncertainties surrounding the major developments that affect the pension systems of the EU. To diversify these risks, EU governments should act on several fronts. In addition to the formation of human capital (especially that of children), employment (especially that of older workers) should be boosted. This calls for social insurance reform with more emphasis on individual saving schemes. Pension schemes should be more explicit about how they share demographic and other risks. Countries that currently rely heavily on public pay-as-you-go (PAYG) schemes should stimulate private pensions by gradually reducing PAYG benefits collected by high-income earners, by issuing new financial instruments, and by conducting intergenerational risk sharing through the tax system. Copyright 2003 by Kluwer Academic Publishers
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Volume (Year): 10 (2003) Issue (Month): 6 (November) Pages: 713-34 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)