IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/fip/fedaer/y1999iq4p16-25nv.84no.4.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Fully funded social security: Now you see it, now you don't?

Author

Listed:
  • Marco A. Espinosa-Vega
  • Steven Russell

Abstract

Governments of countries around the world, including the United States, are considering implementing social security reform programs. In most cases, one of the principal goals of the reform program is to convert a pay-as-you-go social security system into a fully funded system. Most economists believe that the long-run macroeconomic benefits of a successful transition to a fully funded system are likely to be large relative to the benefits from social security reforms of other types. ; The authors of this article describe the basic differences between pay-as-you-go and fully funded systems and explain why these differences are important. They also point out, using Mexico as an example, that it may be difficult to determine which type of social security system a country actually has and even harder to predict whether it will succeed in switching from one type of system to the other. ; As this discussion indicates, the authors believe there may be some room for doubt that Mexico's new social security system is or ever will be fully funded. Instead, the new system may be a pay-as-you-go system of a somewhat different type. This same possibility also applies to other countries that are conducting social security reforms. The authors conclude that the information needed to determine whether these countries are likely to succeed in setting up fully funded systems will be revealed only slowly over time.

Suggested Citation

  • Marco A. Espinosa-Vega & Steven Russell, 1999. "Fully funded social security: Now you see it, now you don't?," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, vol. 84(Q4), pages 16-25.
  • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedaer:y:1999:i:q4:p:16-25:n:v.84no.4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.frbatlanta.org/-/media/documents/research/publications/economic-review/1999/vol84no4_espinosa-russell.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Marco A. Espinosa-Vega & Tapen Sinha, 2000. "A primer and assessment of social security reform in Mexico," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, vol. 85(Q1), pages 1-23.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedaer:y:1999:i:q4:p:16-25:n:v.84no.4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Meredith Rector (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbatus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.