Blogs

The Finnish Centre for Pensions recently reported that Finns continue to retire at a later age. In line with the rising eligibility age for the old-age pension, the average retirement age went up three months in 2019 compared to 2018. This can be seen as a successful outcome of a series of reforms in the Finnish pension system and labour market and is good news in many ways. However, figures of rising retirement ages tend to hide socioeconomic inequalities in extending working lives.

Our pension system is currently sailing through deep waters. The seas are likely to get rougher in the future. Reduced fertility rates and lower interest rates form dark clouds on the sky over our pension system. The most recent gust of icy winds is the corona pandemic, which has only added to the challenges pension financing faces. Yet it is possible to navigate through the rough seas – partly on automatic pilot.

Older people in Finland are forced to give up on things they want to do because of shortage of money and family responsibilities slightly more often than their Swedish and Danish counterparts. Nevertheless, such problems are considerably less common in the Nordic countries than in Eastern and Southern European countries. Things are left undone more often due to shortage of money than family responsibilities.

In Finland, like in most other advanced industrialised countries, low-skilled older workers are at a higher risk of early exit from the labour market than their higher-educated peers. To extend these workers’ working lives, relying on their own responsibility or implementing more government policies alone will not be enough: the help of employers is needed.

Post-retirement work has become more common in Finland and in other countries in recent years. Older people who continue working after retirement have been found to be happier and healthier than those who are not working. This blog clarifies the association between post-retirement work and life satisfaction in Finland. The results are based on a postal survey conducted by the Finnish Centre for Pension in the autumn of 2017.

Providing also future generations of EU citizens with adequate pensions requires a holistic approach. Commonly agreed indicators play a key role in monitoring pensioners’ economic well-being and developing targeted policy measures.

While negotiations to form a new Finnish government are ongoing, various commentators are pleading for the new government to be ambitious in its goals to raise employment levels. Only the question is: whose employment levels and by what measure? Some groups in Finnish society are doing well when compared the same groups in other countries, …

Pensions are intergenerational contracts. In recent decades, many European countries have witnessed low fertility rates, which has put pressure on that contract. Although many assume that they have paid their own pension, this is not the case. When we pay pension contributions, we mostly pay the pensions of the previous generation. Only on a minor …

Is the Finnish pension scheme in debt as only 29 per cent of its liabilities are covered by investment assets? Looking at it from another angle, the funding balance is 98 per cent. How can the figures be so different?

We recently updated our comparative data representing the size of pension funds in different countries in relation to the country’s GDP. We included funds of both statutory (1st pillar) and occupational (2nd pillar) pension schemes. As a reader’s guide we would like to briefly explain some of the different funding mechanisms. 1. Liquidity funds Every …