Gender inequalities in pensions: different components similar levels of dispersion

While the average gender gap in pensions is quite well documented, gender differences in the distribution of pensions have rarely been explored. We show in this paper that pension dispersion is very similar for men and women within the French pension system of a given sector (public or private). Gender differences are less marked among retired civil servants than among former private sector employees. However, the determinants of these inequalities are not the same for men and women. Using a regression-based decomposition of the Gini coefficient, we find that pension dispersion is mostly due to dispersion of the reference wage for all retirees but gender differences exist. For women, in particular, pension dispersion is also due to the dispersion in contribution periods. We also decompose the Gini coefficient by source of pension to measure the impact of institutional rules (minimum pensions, survivor’s pension) on the extent of pension inequality. Unexpectedly, we find that the impact of minimum pensions is limited, although slightly larger for civil servants than for private-sector employees. Survivor’s pension schemes, on the other hand, contribute positively to pension dispersion among retired women.     

Immigrants in the Old‐Age Pension System: The Case of Sweden

The article investigates incomes and especially state pensions 2008 among elderly immigrants who arrived in Sweden before 1970. At age 70 and above, the level of state old‐age pension for immigrant men was nearly the same and for immigrant women somewhat higher than for natives with similar characteristics. At age 65–66 the state pension was lower for immigrants than for their native counterparts. The differences in pensions for immigrants of different ages are probably due to changed rules in the Swedish state old‐age pension system from 2003. The new rules have hit different age groups in different ways. The gaps are partially levelled out when other incomes are included. The extent to which levelling occurs varies greatly between different immigrant groups. For immigrants who have arrived during the last decades, the future state old‐age pension outcomes are expected to be worse.

Policy Implications

• The Swedish Pensions Agency should set up a register of pensions from abroad. This will tell us to what extent old‐age pensions from the home country compensate for low old‐age pensions from the Swedish system.
• Better integration on the labour market is a powerful measure for reducing the risk of future low pensions among immigrants. This is a challenge for Swedish integration policy.
• To what extent can other parts of the Swedish welfare system in the future compensate individuals with low old‐age pensions?

     

Complementarity of pensions and training under multiemployer plans

We compare firmoptimizing and institutional models of labor contracts to investigate how different types of pension plans affect employee training. Unlike previous stud-ies, we consider an expanded voice model of training and pension coverage in which worker and union preferences feed back on firm decisions, and we test for this bidi-rectional causality between pensions and training. A standard view is that firms pro-vide pensions to optimize their training costs. However, when pension coverage is treated as endogenous in a twostage least squares regression (the data are merged 1991 CPS samples), pensions have a negative effect on training. In contrast, when the pension is a definedbenefit, multiemployer plan, training and pensions are comple-ments, consistent with both optimizing and institutional models. We are grateful for excellent research assistance from Michael Ash, Bhashkar Mazumder, and Judith Ruha and for suggestions from Dale Belman, David Card, B.J. Lee, David MacPherson, and John Turner.     

Pensions and the uses of ignorance by unions and firms

Pensions are contingent claims contracts that are often fashioned by collective bargaining under conditions of asymmetric information and market power. Pensions are not an employer’s or a union’s optimal contract; they represent compromise. Employers use pensions to minimize labor costs and to adjust to market changes. Pensions help unions improve and protect their members’ work lives and help unions to survive as institutions. When workers’ estimations of their pensions differ from their employers’ estimations a moral hazard can exist. Less mobile workers and those with less influence subsidize the pension benefits of other workers or reduce an employer’s costs. Econometric results based on data from the President’s Commission on Pension Policy show that certain workers, namely women, overvalue their plans, which provides an opportunity to lower labor costs and redistribute benefits. Unions have a contradictory effect on information. The author thanks participants in the Cornell University Collective Bargaining workshop and the Harvard Labor Economics workshop. I especially thank James Medoff for his comments.     

Contracting-out in the United Kingdom: a partnership between social security and private pension plans

Contracting-out was introduced in the United Kingdom in 1978 as part of the arrangements for the State Earnings-Related Pension Scheme (SERPS) in order to avoid duplication with the existing well-developed defined benefit occupational pension plan sector. Members and sponsors of contracted-out schemes were able to save on their social security contributions in recognition of the fact that they were accruing equivalent benefits through an occupational pension plan. Later on this concept was extended to those with individual money purchase pension plans. This article considers a brief history of contracting-out, the principles of contracting-out, some problems associated with contracting-out, the implications of the introduction of stakeholder pensions and State Second Pension, and the latest rebate review and rebate orders. It examines how U.K. pensions policy since 1978 has been based on a partnership between social security and private pension plans.     

Contracting-Out in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Contracting-out was introduced in the United Kingdom in 1978 as part of the arrangements for the State Earnings-Related Pension Scheme (SERPS) in order to avoid duplication with the existing well-developed defined benefit occupational pension plan sector. Members and sponsors of contracted-out schemes were able to save on their social security contributions in recognition of the fact that they were accruing equivalent benefits through an occupational pension plan. Later on this concept was extended to those with individual money purchase pension plans. This article considers a brief history of contracting-out, the principles of contracting-out, some problems associated with contracting-out, the implications of the introduction of stakeholder pensions and State Second Pension, and the latest rebate review and rebate orders. It examines how U.K. pensions policy since 1978 has been based on a partnership between social security and private pension plans.     

High incidence of disability pension with a psychiatric diagnosis in western Sweden. A population-based study from 1980 to 1998

Regional differences in Sweden in the prevalence of disability pension with a psychiatric diagnosis are unexplained, in spite of the significant impact on the population's health, rehabilitation systems, and the health care system. The purpose of this study was to describe the pattern of disability pensions with a psychiatric diagnosis and to analyze the impact of age and gender. We examined the incidence rates in one urban and one semi-rural region and compared these to national rates. The study sample was drawn from employed persons between 16-64 years of age who, because of their sickness insurance coverage, would be eligible to access disability pensions should it be necessary. Analysis of annual incidences and standardized morbidity ratios were made for 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, and 1998. Data on disability pension cases were collected from the National Social Insurance registers. In the urban region we found that the proportion of men and women clearly outnumbered the national average: approximately twice the number of persons between 16-64 years of age with a psychiatric diagnosis were receiving a disability pension. In the semi-rural region there were fewer men overall on disability pensions with psychiatric disorders, but in 1980, 1985, and 1995 women clearly outnumbered men. Access to psychiatric care, unemployment, alcohol dependence, and previous sickness absence are suggested as possible factors that might affect the rates of disability pension in different geographical settings.     

Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution

Russia’s transition to a market economy has been accompanied by serious, and in some ways unanticipated, disruptions of the existing social welfare system. The social policy dilemma has become a contentious issue in the national political arena. This paper examines the debate on the relationship between social welfare and democratization in post-communist Russia, exploring the case of pensions for the elderly. Although the causes of the pension crisis are complex and rooted in institutional difficulties, the state’s fiscal weakness alone does not explain the difficulties and controversies associated with Russia’s pension crisis. Analysis of the assumptions and principles of pension policy during the Soviet era and perestroika reveals that Russia today is caught between contradictory and competing discourses over citizens’ entitlement to pensions: Is an old-age pension to be considered a reward distributed by a prosperous society, or a basic and inviolable human right? Although the Russian government has used an argument that in effect makes pensions conditional on government resources, citizen and opposition protest has to some extent compelled the Russian government to be increasingly sensitive to demands for guaranteed pensions.     

PENSION SURVIVORS INSURANCE FOR WIDOWS

Men frequently do not provide pension survivors insurance for their wives. To analyze why, a demand-supply model of survivors insurance is presented. Using the Survey of Private Pension Benefit Amounts, Tobit estimates are calculated for a sample of married male pensioners. Social security reduces the survivors insurance provided through private pensions, partially foiling governmental attempts to reduce poverty among widows. The decline in inflation and the Supreme Court's unisex pension decisions have increased the selection of pension survivors insurance so that an increase could not necessarily be attributed to the passage of the Retirement Equity Act.     

Innenansichten eines Wohlfahrtsmarkts

The 2001 pension reform act (“Riester reform”) has recast old-age security in Germany by placing more emphasis on private provisions. The new policy draws on markets and competitive structures in social welfare, as done earlier in long-term care and in public utilities. In the social welfare sector in Germany, such privatisation mostly goes hand in hand with a far-reaching “social” regulation of markets. Old-age pensions are the most recent case in point. For the first time, financial markets figure as welfare markets. This is done in the politically most sensitive sector of the German welfare state, old-age security. In theoretical terms, we interpret the change as a structural transformation of German “social capitalism”. Empirically, we investigate the structure of the new welfare market and the attitudes of the providers, based on a survey of all providers of private pensions in Germany. The findings include: (1) Markets can produce the welfare good “income security in old-age” only by way of a complex arrangement of three markets – financial markets, pension markets and markets for financial consultancy services. (2) The pension reform of 2001 has given rise to a new welfare market: an old-age pension market as a distinct sub sector of the wider market for financial investment and saving. The pension market constitutes a new field of business, with new actors, new products and new arenas of competition. The new market is created and shaped by politics. (3) The new private pension market combines market principles with welfare state principles. The providers conceive of their business as contributing to social security, and they recognise that the state sustains and structures the market.     

Affirming, Transforming, or Neglecting Gender? Conceptualizing Gender in the Pension Reform Process

This article analyzes the gender visions adopted by policy actorsin pension reform debates. Based on the work of Fraser (Fraser, N. 1994."After the Family Wage: Gender Equity and the Welfare State."Political Theory 22 : 591–618; Fraser, N. 1995. "FromRedistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’Age." New Left Review 212:68–93), four gendered visionsof public pensions are introduced and then applied to pensionreforms in Belgium and Sweden. In line with international trends,both cases seek to integrate women within a pension system thattreats men and women the same regardless of their nonmarketactivities. However, in both cases, some compensation is introducedto acknowledge the caring functions performed mainly by women.Based on Fraser's typology, this arrangement leads to one ofthe worst-case scenarios since it legitimizes pension systemsthat are predominantly geared toward full-time contributorsand penalizes those individuals most likely to spend sometimesaway from the labor market. The Belgian case emphasizes thenegative role of the EU in retrenching pension rights and benefitsfor women. The Swedish case is interesting because of the scopeof its reform and the fact that women in the service sectorend up supporting the principle of tying benefits to contributions.     

Re-examining female labor supply responses to the 1994 Australian pension reform

Many governments are aiming to extend working lives by raising the age at which people can claim retirement pensions. This makes it vital to understand how these policies affect retirement decisions. In this paper, I revisit the labor supply effects of a major Australian reform that increased women’s pension age from 60 to 65. Atalay and Barrett (2015) studied these effects using repeated household surveys and a differences-in-differences design in which male cohorts form the comparison group. They estimate that the reform increased female labor force participation by 12 percentage points. Using earlier data, I show that the parallel-trends assumption did not hold before the reform because of a strong female-specific trend in participation rates across the relevant cohorts. Accounting for this trend, the estimated effect on female participation falls by two-thirds and becomes statistically insignificant at conventional levels. This highlights the importance of carefully assessing and controlling for trends across cohorts when evaluating pension reforms, which are typically phased in across cohorts.

     

Employee preferences for pension plan features

Data from 517 survey respondents were used to analyze the determinants of the shares of a hypothetical $1,000 budget that employees were given to allocate to cash wages and pension plan features involving early retirement, postponed retirement, and infla-tion protection. Employee preferences for pension plan features generally reflected the potential for pensions to deal with such factors as risk sharing, family lifecycle decision making, and cash constraints, as those factors were related to observable per-sonal and demographic characteristics of employees as well as to their labor market circumstances and wealth embodied in their pension plans. Amongst other implica-tions, our analysis highlights that the demand is greater for early retirement and infla-tion protection than for postponed retirement, and the demand for early retirement is likely to increase as the work force ages, dual pension families become more promi-nent, and layoffs and job changing continue. Financial assistance from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is gratefully acknowledged.     

Pension prospects of minority ethnic groups: inequalities by gender and ethnicity

Minority ethnic groups have low income in later life from private pensions, partly due to shorter employment records in Britain since migration. Yet disadvantage and discrimination in the labour market, as well as differences in cultural norms concerning women's employment, may lead to persistence of ethnic variation in private pension acquisition. Little is known about the pension arrangements made by men and women in minority ethnic groups during the working life. This paper examines the extent of ethnic disadvantage in private pension scheme arrangements and analyses variation according to gender and specific ethnic group, using three years of the British Family Resources Survey, which provides information on over 97,000 adults aged 20-59, including over 5,700 from ethnic minorities. Both men and women in minority ethnic groups were less likely to have private pension coverage than their white counterparts but the extent of the difference was most marked for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. Ethnicity interacted with gender, so that Blacks showed the least gender inequality in private pension arrangements, reflecting the relatively similar full-time employment rates of Black men and women. A minority ethnic disadvantage in private pension coverage, for both men and women, remained after taking account of age, marital and parental status, years of education, employment variables, class and income. The research suggests that minority ethnic groups - especially women - will be disproportionately dependent on means-tested benefits in later life, due to the combined effects of low private pension coverage and the policy of shifting pension provision towards the private sector.     

Pension reforms and old people in Poland: An age,class, and gender lens

Research on the socio-economic transition in and subsequent pension reforms in Eastern and Central Europe tend to view age as a social status, not a power relation. In addition, studies that explore the policy consequences for old people tend to homogenize them or focus on only one form of inequality. However, State actions, articulated in pension reforms, can distribute the economic costs of reforms unevenly across different groups.This paper considers the present and the future ramifications of the Polish pension reforms on the economic well being of diverse groups of old people. Poland provides an especially interesting case because the new system, which will take full effect in 2006, includes mandatory personal accounts. Throughout our analysis, we attend to inequality and the class- and gender-specific implications of the reforms. We argue that age, gender, and class relations underlie social policies related to pensions. Old people are depicted and manipulated by State officials in ways that allow the latter to attain economic stability and legitimate their authority among other constituencies, especially the young. Finally, analysis of the expected outcomes of the Polish new pension system that includes personal accounts provides a reference point against which proposals in other countries, such as the U.S., debating the introduction of similar systems can be assessed. Thus, we conclude by discussing some trends relevant to future Polish retirees and briefly state the implications of our discussion for these debates.     

Pension norms and pension reforms in Europe – the effects on gender pension gaps

Pension levels in the EU15 are significantly gendered. Various reforms to pension systems explicitly aim at improving women's opportunities to build up pension entitlements. These reforms differ from country to country. We see so-called work–life balance policies to increase women's labour market participation by facilitating part-time employment in particular as well as pension entitlements for care periods outside the labour market. At the same time, however, other seemingly gender neutral reforms generally tend to have the opposite effect. These measures include changes in pension calculation norms and pension composition, increasing the importance of non-public pensions. Therefore, future female pensioners will not be significantly better off. However, for women to be better off is necessary in times of pension retrenchments and individualization.

Based on recent life-course theories and studies, this article analyses the multiplicity of reasons for gender differentiated pension levels. It shows that the numerous direct and indirect pension determining factors related to life courses and welfare arrangements are interlinked on many fronts. Their cumulative effects finally result in (continued) significant gender gaps. It is argued that there are no quick fixes for reducing the gender gaps in pensions but that this will require attention to the degendering of labour market and the reformulation of life course norms.     

How Well-Informed Are Pension Scheme Members on Their Future Pension Benefits? Evidence from Ireland

One part of the policy response in many countries to increasing pension coverage will be greater private provision on the part of individuals. This requires that individuals are well informed about pensions. In this article, we assess levels of knowledge of pensions using a representative sample of older Irish adults. We find that two-thirds of individuals enrolled in pension schemes do not know what amount will be paid out on retirement and/or whether the payments will be in the form of lump sums, monthly payments, or both. One policy implication is the need for increased information to be directed at certain groups, in particular, women and less educated people. More fundamentally, the results suggest that the mandatory elements in pension systems should be extended.     

Addressing gender discrimination in Vietnam's light manufacturing industry: What role for labor law?

This paper explores women workers’ experiences of gender discrimination at work in Vietnam and whether labor law might enable them to challenge discriminatory practices. Interviews with workers reveal how discrimination is generated and entrenched through seemingly neutral workplace rules and culture. The coercive and intensive nature of assembly work has deterred or prevented working mothers from enjoying fair and decent work. Survey findings on female workers’ mobilization of the law suggest that women who have experienced discrimination in the past are less inclined to choose a legal means when faced with future discrimination. In most cases, women would choose not to take any action or opt for a non-legal means to raise their voices. In conclusion, even though women workers in general do not consider law a potential tool to tackle discrimination, they have absorbed and appropriated the language of the law to make sense of unfair practices at work.     

居民养老保险:参保主体、筹资与待遇水平

本文从参保结构、筹资水平和待遇水平等3个方面对城乡居民养老保险制度进行了分析。研究发现,在参保结构方面,伴随着城镇化率的提高,居民养老保险参保人数的相对比例在下降;在筹资水平方面,个人缴费水平过低,其主要原因是财政补贴资金激励性不足,从而需要在进一步提高财政补贴的同时,优化补贴结构,提高对个人缴费的激励作用;在待遇方面,居民养老金总体水平较低、但增长幅度较大,与职工待遇相比,替代率的差距要远远小于绝对额的差距。     

Women and Economic Security in Retirement:Implications for Social Security Reform

Gender-related parenting roles lower incomes of women during the working-age years and in retirement years. National retirement income programs contribute to this gender-related difference in retirement income to the degree that they consider lifetime earnings in calculating benefits. This article examines two national pension systems: those of Australia and Sweden. The pension systems of these two countries often are considered as the extremes of pension generosity, and they are based upon different philosophies about the role of government in insuring against economic risk. Due to fiscal issues and the changing roles of women in the labor market, both have reformed their systems. How system reforms can balance the role of the government in insuring against income risk and the growing financial independence of women in the work force are discussed.