Notional defined contribution pension schemes: Why does only Sweden distribute the survivor dividend?

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of the survivor dividend in notional defined contribution (NDC) pension schemes. At present, this feature can only be found in the Swedish defined contribution scheme. We develop a model that endorses the idea that the survivor dividend has a strong basis for enabling the NDC scheme to achieve financial equilibrium and that not including the dividend is a non-transparent way of compensating for increases in longevity and/or legacy costs from old pension systems. We also find that the average effect of the dividend remains unchanged for any constant annual rate of population growth, that contribu-tors who reach retirement age always get a higher return than the scheme does, and that population growth enables cohorts with more years of contributions to benefit to a greater extent from the dividend effect

Last lessons learned from the Swedish public pension system

Retirement systems across the world are undergoing major reforms to adapt to continuously changing economic and demographic factors. Among these major changes are the so-called notional defined contribution pension schemes (NDCs), first developed about 20 years ago in countries such as Italy, Latvia, Poland and Sweden. These pension schemes attempt to reproduce the logic of a financial defined contribution pension plan within a pay-as-you-go framework. Among the countries with NDCs, Sweden is the only one where an automatic balancing mechanism goes hand in hand with the prior calculation of a financial solvency indicator that emerges from an actuarial balance sheet. This chapter describes the Swedish pension experience over the 2007–2015 period through its accounting method, together with the problems faced by the system and the policy responses

The Continuous Sample of Working Lives: improving its representativeness

This paper studies the representativeness of the Continuous Sample of Working Lives (CSWL), a set of anonymized microdata containing information on individuals from Spanish Social Security records. We examine several CSWL waves (2005-2013) and show that it is not representative for the population with a pension income. We then develop a methodology to draw a large dataset from the CSWL that is much more representative of the retired population in terms of pension type, gender and age. This procedure also makes it possible for users to choose between goodness of fit and subsample size. In order to illustrate the practical significance of our methodology, the paper also contains an application in which we generate a large subsample distribution from the 2010 CSWL. The results are striking: with a very small reduction in the size of the original CSWL, we significantly reduce errors in estimating pension expenditure for 2010, with a p value greater or equal to 0.999

¿Puede el análisis actuarial (NDCs, BAs y MFAs) mejorar el sistema de pensiones de reparto?

El objetivo de este trabajo es mostrar la conveniencia de incorporar al sistemade pensiones de reparto, herramientas para mejorar su equidad, transparencia ysolvencia, lo que enlaza con la tendencia que se aprecia en algunos paísesavanzados de implantar metodología del análisis actuarial al campo de la gestiónpública. Con el fin de cumplir con el objetivo establecido, en el trabajose explican y se desarrollan analíticamente algunos aspectos de las cuentas nocionales de aportación definida (NDC), el balance actuarial (BA), y los mecanismos financieros de ajuste automático (MFA). La principal conclusiónalcanzada es que estas herramientas, no son meros conceptos teóricos alejadosde la realidad; más bien responden a la creciente demanda social de transparenciaen el ámbito de la gestión financiera pública, al deseo de empujar sostenidament