Cure de jouvence pour les retraites : les grandes orientations

Both the population and institutional arrangements have grown older, leading to compounding challenges for public finance and the social fabric. The contribution aims at identifying guiding principles for reforming the pension system in Belgium with a view of increasing the participation rate of older workers. Three sets of guidelines are presented. The first one is targeted at addressing the lack of actuarial fairness, or neutrality, in the current arrangements. Next to the notional pension accounts it could be answered with individual pension formulas being based on the ratio between contributing years and life expectancy at time of retirement, while improving the solidarity component of pension transfers. The second one is targeted at the labor market, with the identification of disincentives for corporations to keep older workers on their payroll and of factors other than the lack of actuarial neutrality discouraging workers from working longer. The third one is devoted to the harmonization of pension regimes and to the reform of private pension schemes. The paper concludes with a short comment about the interaction between a structural pension reform and the ongoing institutional reform debate about the future of Belgium.