Agneta Kruse

A Stable Pension System: The Eighth Wonder

The Ageing Population.- In This World Nothing Is Certain but Death and Taxes: Financing the Elderly.- A Stable Pension System: The Eighth Wonder.- Ways of Funding and Organising Elderly Care in Sweden.- Financing Healthcare: A Gordian Knot Waiting to Be Cut.- Towards a New Swedish Model?.Ageing, with increases in the old-age dependency ratio, puts a strain on pension systems organised as a pay-as-you-go system. The question asked is whether the Swedish system will be politically as weill as financially stable in the future. The design is described and analysed with resspect to sustainability.

Pension design and gender

Pension systems and their reforms may have a different impact on men and women because of their different employment histories and demographic characteristics. This paper examines the design of pension systems from a gender perspective. We describe the features of systems and analyse their expected effects on incentives, pension benefits and income distribution for men and women. Empirical results show estimates of the outcomes for men and women in the new Swedish pension system.

Early retirement in Sweden

In this paper we report and to some extent discuss how the Swedish social security system has been organized with respect to early retirements. We look in particular at the so called partial (or part-time) pension which was introduced in 1976. By this pension individuals in the ages 60 to 64 years are compensated for their income loss due to early retirement, provided that they do not leave the labor market.

Demographic Structure and Labor Supply in a Pay–As–You–Go Pension System: Effects on Contributions and Benefits

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on demographic structure and labor supply in a pay-as-you-go pension system. The public pension system in Sweden is designed as a pay-as-you-go system. Such a system is considered to have some valuable characteristics. In a steady-state growth model, Samuelson showed that it can be a Pareto improvement to choose a pay-as-you-go system instead of a funded system. In a pure pay-as-you-go system, the amount contributed to the system during one year is equal to the amount paid out as pensions during the same year. An individuals contribution is usually determined as a fixed percentage of the wage. In a pure pay-as-you-go system, if the fee is fixed and the demographic structure constant, the benefit level follows the rate of growth of income in the economy. Under these conditions, the distribution of consumption possibilities between the active generation and the pensioners is constant over time. As soon as what is conceived of as a just distribution is established, and the fee accordingly determined, the distribution will repeat itself in period after period, irrespective of the growth of income in the society. A pay-as-you-go system with these features is, thus, stable.