The UK pension system is traditionally seen as offering a good example to other countries, having features such as a low social security burden of the public sector as well as a high coverage of well-financed voluntary private schemes. But recent developments suggest that the model has shown weaknesses. The most pressing current issue is underfunding of defined benefit occupational schemes following the bear market; but there are also the ongoing crises of mis-selling of personal pensions and the failure of Equitable Life insurance company. In this paper we seek to investigate whether there is indeed a crisis and what the locus of the true crisis is. We find that there are important longer-term weaknesses of the UK system as well as these current difficulties, focusing on social security as well as private pensions. Pitfalls faced by UK policymakers offer important lessons to other countries seeking to set up or expand private pension provision.
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Paper provided by Economics and Finance Section, School of Social Sciences, Brunel University in its series Public Policy Discussion Papers with number
03-21.
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.)
Marc Pomp & M. Bijlsma & Machiel van Dijk & Michiel van Leuvensteijn & C. Zonderland, 2005.
"Competition in markets for life insurance,"
CPB Documents
96, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
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