Every society faces the difficult task of providing support for older people who are no longer working. In an earlier era, retirees lived with their adult children, providing childcare and helping around the house.
However, those days are largely gone. Retirees and their adult children alike prefer living independently.
In a rational, economic world, individuals would save during their working years, accumulating enough to purchase an annuity that finances a comfortable standard of living when they retire, but that is not what most people do, either because of their shortsightedness or because of the incentives created by government social security programs.
European governments since the time of former German chancellor Otto von Bismarck and US governments since former US president Franklin Roosevelt have therefore maintained pay-as-you-go (PAYG) retirement pension systems. More recently, Japan has adopted such a system.
However, providing benefits to support a comfortable standard of living for retirees with just a modest rate of tax on the working population depends on there being a small number of pensioners relative to the number of taxpayers.
That was true in the early years of such programs, but maintaining benefit levels became more difficult as more workers lived long enough to retire and longer after retirement, which increased the ratio of retirees to the taxpaying population.
LONGEVITY
Life expectancy in the US has increased from 63 years in 1940, when the US Social Security program began, to 78 last year. In 1960, there were five workers per retiree; today there are only three.
Looking ahead, the US Social Security Administration’s actuaries forecast that the number of workers per retiree will decline to two by 2030.
That implies that the tax rate needed to achieve the current benefit structure would have to rise from 12 percent to 18 percent in 2030.
Other major countries face a similar problem.
If it is not politically possible to raise the tax rate to support future retirees with the current structure of benefits, there are only two options to avoid a collapse of the entire system:
One option is to slow the future growth of benefits so that they can be financed without a substantial tax increase.
The other is to shift from a pure PAYG system to a mixed system that supplements fixed benefits with returns from financial investments.
A US example shows how slowing the growth of benefits might work in a politically acceptable way.
In 1983, the age at which one became eligible to receive full social security benefits was raised from 65 to 67. This effective benefit reduction was politically possible because the change began only after a substantial delay and has since been phased in over several decades.
Moreover, individuals are still eligible to receive benefits as early as age 62 with an actuarial adjustment.
Since that change was enacted, the life expectancy of someone in their mid-60s has increased by about three years, continuing a pattern of one-year-per-decade increases in longevity for someone of that age.
Some economists, including me, now advocate raising the age for full benefits by another three years, to 70, and then indexing the future age for full benefits to keep the life expectancy of beneficiaries unchanged.
MIXED SYSTEM
Consider the second option: combining the PAYG system with financial investments.
Pension systems operated by private companies achieve benefits at a lower cost by investing in portfolios of stocks and bonds.
A typical US private pension has 60 percent of its assets in equities and the remaining 40 percent in high-quality bonds, providing a real — inflation-adjusted — rate of return of about 5.5 percent over long periods of time.
In contrast, taxes collected for a PAYG system produce a real rate of return of about 2 percent without investing in financial assets, because real wages and the number of taxpayers rise.
It would be possible to replace the existing PAYG systems gradually with a pure investment-based system that produces the same expected level of benefits with a much lower tax rate.
Unfortunately, the benefits produced by that contribution rate would entail significant risk that the benefits would be substantially below the expected level.
Research that I and others have conducted shows that a mixed system that combines the existing PAYG system with a small investment-based component can achieve a higher expected level of benefits with little risk of lower benefit levels.
The current structure of pension systems in most developed countries cannot be sustained without cutting benefit levels substantially or introducing much higher taxes.
A shift to a mixed system that combines the stability of the PAYG benefits with the higher return of market-based investments would permit countries to avoid that choice altogether.
Martin Feldstein, a professor of economics at Harvard University and president emeritus of the US National Bureau of Economic Research, is a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. He is on the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Group of 30, a non-profit international body that seeks greater understanding of global economic issues.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
There is much evidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is sending soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and is learning lessons for a future war against Taiwan. Until now, the CCP has claimed that they have not sent PLA personnel to support Russian aggression. On 18 April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinskiy announced that the CCP is supplying war supplies such as gunpowder, artillery, and weapons subcomponents to Russia. When Zelinskiy announced on 9 April that the Ukrainian Army had captured two Chinese nationals fighting with Russians on the front line with details
On a quiet lane in Taipei’s central Daan District (大安), an otherwise unremarkable high-rise is marked by a police guard and a tawdry A4 printout from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicating an “embassy area.” Keen observers would see the emblem of the Holy See, one of Taiwan’s 12 so-called “diplomatic allies.” Unlike Taipei’s other embassies and quasi-consulates, no national flag flies there, nor is there a plaque indicating what country’s embassy this is. Visitors hoping to sign a condolence book for the late Pope Francis would instead have to visit the Italian Trade Office, adjacent to Taipei 101. The death of
By now, most of Taiwan has heard Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an’s (蔣萬安) threats to initiate a vote of no confidence against the Cabinet. His rationale is that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)-led government’s investigation into alleged signature forgery in the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) recall campaign constitutes “political persecution.” I sincerely hope he goes through with it. The opposition currently holds a majority in the Legislative Yuan, so the initiation of a no-confidence motion and its passage should be entirely within reach. If Chiang truly believes that the government is overreaching, abusing its power and targeting political opponents — then
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), joined by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), held a protest on Saturday on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei. They were essentially standing for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is anxious about the mass recall campaign against KMT legislators. President William Lai (賴清德) said that if the opposition parties truly wanted to fight dictatorship, they should do so in Tiananmen Square — and at the very least, refrain from groveling to Chinese officials during their visits to China, alluding to meetings between KMT members and Chinese authorities. Now that China has been defined as a foreign hostile force,
RSS