Publication: Progress and Challenges of Nonfinancial Defined Contribution Pension Schemes: Volume 1. Addressing Marginalization, Polarization, and the Labor Market
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2020
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2019-09-24
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This is the third publication to analyze progress, challenges, and adjustment options of this reform revolution for mandated public pension schemes. The individual account-based but unfunded approach that promises fair and financially sustainable benefits is a reform benchmark for all pension schemes. Nonfinancial defined contribution (NDC) schemes originated in the 1990s independently in Italy and Sweden, were then adopted by Latvia, Poland, and Norway, envisaged but not implemented in various other countries (such as Egypt and Russia), and remain under discussion in many countries across the world (such as China and France). In its complete form, the approach also comprises budget-financed basic income provisions and mandated or voluntary funded provisions. Volume 1 offers an assessment of early reform countries before addressing key aspects of policy implementation and design review, including: how to best combine basic income provisions with NDC; how to deal with heterogeneity in longevity; and how to adjust NDC design and labor market policies to deliver on reform expectations. Volume 2 addresses a second set of important issues, including: the gender pension gap and what family policies can do within the NDC frame; the administrative challenges of NDCs and how countries are coping; the role of communication in NDCs; and the complexity of cross-border pension taxation, and much more.
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“Palacios, Robert; Holzmann, Robert; Palmer, Edward; Sacchi, Stefano. 2020. Progress and Challenges of Nonfinancial Defined Contribution Pension Schemes: Volume 1. Addressing Marginalization, Polarization, and the Labor Market. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/32438 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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Publication Progress and Challenges of Nonfinancial Defined Contribution Pension Schemes(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020)This is the third publication to analyze progress, challenges, and adjustment options of this . reform revolution for mandated public pension schemes. The individual account-based but unfunded approach that promises fair and financially sustainable benefits is a reform benchmark for all pension schemes. Nonfinancial defined contribution (NDC) schemes originated in the 1990s independently in Italy and Sweden, were then adopted by Latvia, Poland, and Norway, envisaged but not implemented in various other countries (such as Egypt and Russia), and remain under discussion in many countries across the world (such as China and France). In its complete form, the approach also comprises budget-financed basic income provisions and mandated or voluntary funded provisions. Volume 1 offers an assessment of early reform countries before addressing key aspects of policy implementation and design review, including: how to best combine basic income provisions with NDC; how to deal with heterogeneity in longevity; and how to adjust NDC design and labor market policies to deliver on reform expectations. Volume 2 addresses a second set of important issues, including: the gender pension gap and what family policies can do within the NDC frame; the administrative challenges of NDCs and how countries are coping; the role of communication in NDCs; and the complexity of cross-border pension taxation, and much more.Publication Nonfinancial Defined Contribution Pension Schemes in a Changing Pension World : Volume 1. Progress, Lessons, and Implementation(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012)Pensions and social insurance programs are an integral part of any social protection system. Their dual objectives are to prevent a sharp decline in income and protect against poverty resulting from old age, disability, or death. The critical role of pensions for protection, prevention, and promotion was reiterated and expanded in the new World Bank 2012-2022 social protection strategy. This new strategy reviews the success and challenges of the past decade or more, during which time the World Bank became a main player in the area of pensions. But more importantly, the strategy takes the three key objectives for pensions under the World Bank's conceptual framework coverage, adequacy, and sustainability and asks how these objectives and the inevitable difficult balance between them can best be achieved. The ongoing focus on closing the coverage gap with social pensions and the new outreach to explore the role of matching contributions to address coverage and/or adequacy is part of this strategy. This comprehensive anthology on nonfinancial defined contribution (NDC) pension schemes is part and parcel of the effort to explore and document the working of this new system or reform option and its ability to balance these three key objectives. This innovative, unfunded individual accounts scheme provides a promising option at a time when the world seems locked into a stalemate between piecemeal reform of ailing traditional defined benefit plans or their replacement with prefunded financial account schemes. The current financial crisis, with its focus on sovereign debt, has enhanced the attraction of NDC as a pension scheme that aims for intra and intergenerational fairness, offers a transparent framework to distribute economic and demographic risks, and, if well designed, promises long-term financial stability. Supplemented with a basic minimum pension guarantee, explicit noncontributory rights, and a funded pillar, the NDC approach provides an efficient framework for addressing poverty and risk diversification concerns.Publication Pension Reform : Issues and Prospects for Non-Financial Defined Contribution Schemes(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006)The previous decade has been one of pension reform throughout the world. In high income countries, the driving force has been the threat that current systems will become unaffordable in coming decades, with demographic developments presenting a major risk. In another setting, countries in the process of transition from a command, to a market economy are confronted with the challenge of introducing a public pension system that will provide social security in old age, but that also supports the fundamentals of a market economy. In the latter sense, it is important to examine carefully the experiences of developed market economies. Even in these countries, the driving force behind reform is demographic change and affordability. In a third setting, middle and lower-middle income countries are faced with the question of what system will best serve the interests of their specific country goals for the future. In all of these settings "NDC"-non-financial defined contribution-pension schemes have been on the agenda in discussions of possible options. Sweden is one of the few countries to have implemented an NDC scheme in the 1990s, when NDC came into its own as a concept, implemented in four European Union (EU) countries (Italy, Latvia, and Poland are the other three). NDC has become a reform option considered by many countries, understandably since most of Europe has a pay-as-you-go tradition, and NDC constitutes a new way to "organize" a mandatory, universal pay-as-you-go pension system. With some experience of NDC schemes implemented, it is felt particularly relevant for Sweden to host a conference devoted to discussing both the conceptual and institutional aspects of NDC. The goal was even more ambitious, however: to contribute to creating a synthesis of current knowledge on this new topic. This book is the realization of that goal. It comprises discussion papers on the status of NDC, its concept and the reform strategies that follow. Papers also discuss the conceptual issues of design and implementation , lessons from countries with NDC contribution schemes, and finalizes on the potential of NDC contribution schemes in other countries' reforms.Publication Nonfinancial Defined Contribution Pension Schemes in a Changing Pension World : Volume 2. Gender, Politics, and Financial Stability(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013)The concept of nonfinancial (notional) defined contribution (NDC) was born in the early 1990s and implemented from the mid-1990s in a number of countries. This innovative unfunded individual account scheme emerged and created high hopes at a time when the world seemed to have been locked into a stalemate between making piecemeal reforms of ailing traditional pay- as-you-go defined benefit schemes and introducing prefunded financial account schemes. Nonfinancial (notional) defined contribution (NDC) plans are designed to eliminate the work disincentives and nontransparent redistributions of defined benefit (DB) social security schemes without the transition costs and risk shifting that occurs in the context of a switch to a funded defined contribution (DC) scheme. To a large extent, they sweep away the special privileges that, intentionally or inadvertently, accrue to various groups in traditional schemes and pay everyone in accordance with his or her own contributions. However, not surprisingly, these new provisions will have different effects on diverse population subgroups, including men and women. Most of the effects do not stem from explicit gender-specific provisions in the plans, but rather from the interaction of gender-free policies with differing demographic and employment characteristics of men and women. The same policies affect the two genders differently because of the more limited labor force attachment of women as a result of their childbearing and childrearing roles, their lower earnings when they do work, their longer life expectancy, and the likelihood that they will eventually become widows and live alone in very old age. Both financial defined contribution (FDC) and NDC plans make certain design choices explicit that are implicit in DB plans. Although this feature allows for more informed decision making, it can also be politically sensitive and divisive. In some cases, the decision process is simpler for NDC plans than for FDC plans. NDC plans do not have individual investments and, therefore, do not have the problems that FDCs face and that stem from decentralized investment decisions.Publication Adequacy of Retirement Income after Pension Reforms in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe : Eight Country Studies(World Bank, 2009)All of the former transition economies in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe (CESE) inherited from the era of central planning traditional defined-benefit pension systems financed on a pay-as-you-go basis. Like many pay-as-you-go public pension systems elsewhere in the world, CESE pension systems were in need of reforms to address short-term fiscal imbalances and longer-term issues relating to population aging. Reforms were also needed to adjust benefit and contribution structures to meet the challenges of-as well as to take advantage of opportunities relating to the transition to a market economy, including the widespread adoption of multiplier designs with improved risk-sharing across funded and unfunded pillars. By 2006, most countries in Europe and Central Asia had introduced a voluntary private pension scheme. By 2008, 14 countries roughly half of all countries in the region had legislated mandatory private pension schemes, and all but one of those schemes (the one in Ukraine) had been introduced. These reforms shared a number of common objectives, in particular putting the systems on a sounder financial footing and better aligning them with the (very different) incentives of a market economy. This report is organized as follows. The first section discusses the motivation for reform across the eight countries included in the study against the backdrop of the regional (and global) trend toward multiplier pension arrangements. The second section summarizes the key provisions of the reformed systems in the eight countries within the World Bank's five-pillar framework for pension system design. The third section summarizes pension system performance against the two crucially important dimensions of adequacy and sustainability. The last section provides some policy recommendations for addressing gaps in reforms and taking advantage of further opportunities.
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