Blogs

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 …

In its latest pension reform, Finland relaxed the rules for retirement, giving people more freedom to combine work and retirement. By introducing a new partial pension, Finland is following the old-age pension scheme design of Sweden and Norway. So far, the experiences from all three countries indicate that people want to combine work and retirement …

Pensioners in Europe have considerably more money to spend today than in the early 2000s. The poverty rate has gone down by around 20%, and the gap in income between pensioners and working-age people has become narrower. These are all good news about pensioners’ economic welfare in Europe. But if we look at this from …

It is said that one of the core values of Europe is diversity. This certainly holds true when looking at pension systems. There is such a diversity of actors, financing mechanisms as well as public-private mixes that it is easy to conclude that Europe embraces diversity as much in its pension systems as in its …

Countries that pay more attention to human capital development and capacitating policies throughout the life course, and not just at the tail end of working life, are successful in extending working lives. This is the main finding of our recent comparative study (pdf), pointing to the long-term effects of social policy on the whole. The reversal …

At first glance, the thought of extending working lives by doing less work seems counter-intuitive: how can something be extended by reducing it? However, when analyzing working lives we need to scrap intuition. The lengths of working lives are not predetermined; people constantly make choices that will have an impact on the total length of …