Voluntary Pensions Development and the Adequacy of the Mandatory Pension System: Is There a Trade-Off?

The policy-makers’ efforts to increase the role of voluntary pension systems observed in many countries reflect a more general tendency, which is the privatisation of social risks. The paper examines, from a comparative perspective, to what extent European countries have privatised their pensions in terms of voluntary pension systems. It aggregates and reports data on the assets, membership, and contributions in various pension plans across 20 European countries. To assess the overall relevance of voluntary pension systems in the studied countries, it proposes the Voluntary Pensions Index (VPI), which allows for cross-country comparisons. The paper analyses the relationship between the development of voluntary pensions and pension benefit adequacy in the mandatory schemes form two perspectives: current workers and current beneficiaries. The empirical results suggest that various levels of VPI in the countries studied can be explained by the differences in the pension systems generosity, but only towards the current working-age generation. In countries where the mandatory pension benefits are expected to be smaller, the supplementary pensions play a greater role. The results also imply that in countries with a flatter pension benefit formula adopted in the mandatory system, voluntary pensions are better developed. The adequacy of pension benefits from the mandatory system, as seen from the current beneficiaries’ perspective, does not seem to have an impact on the amount of savings and participation in the voluntary programmes.