Demography, Economy and Policy Choices: The Three Corners of the Pension Conundrum

NDC (notional defined contribution) pension systems are usually considered the best in the PAYGO (pay-as-you-go) category: they mimic funding, seem to be well balanced, and have very limited distortionary effects on the labour market. In this paper, after highlighting of few of their weaknesses, I suggest an alternative solution to the pension problem: IPAYGO, or improved PAYGO. Its guiding principle, “everything is relative”, is applied consistently to both the economic and the demographic part of the problem: this makes the system viable in all possible demographic and economic scenarios. Depending on a few explicit policy (parametric) choices, IPAYGO may take very different shapes, and adapt to national preferences, such as early or late retirement, generous or limited pension benefits, and greater or lesser emphasis on actuarial equity. A properly designed IPAYGO, even in its basic form (the only one discussed here), can tackle issues such as inequities deriving from differential mortality (with the richer living longer), pension-induced low fertility, and quasi-capital gains and losses. While IPAYGO is conceived to be an operative instrument, it can also be used to evaluate existing pensions systems, and the phase a population is going through, with a novel measure of the so-called “demographic bonus” (or “malus”).