Pensions and who pays for them

The illustrated chart from the Economist caught my eye the other day, making in a rather more serious way one of the long runs I was making on the second of the two posts attributed to 17th November (these attributions being a little dodgy, being geared up to some Californian time rather than the Greenwich Mean Time which rules in this part of the world).

Interesting that four large and important countries - Japan, Spain, Germany and France - choose to pay their pensioners out of current income, rather than having prospective pensioners do some saving while they still can. While, on the one hand one might say that it all amounts to much the same thing in the end, that the people working now have to make the bread & bacon for the people not working now as well as for themselves, one might also say that pensioners living off their savings have a different sort of title to their pensions than, say, retired civil servants like myself who may have earned their pensions but do not own them in quite the same way.

I was moved to go and take a peek at the OECD website where there is a whole forest of stuff about all this, presumably the work of heaps of globe trotting actuaries, and where I found something called the 'OECD Pensions Outlook 2012'. While I could not find the chart that the Economist had highlighted there was lots of stuff, as you can see for yourself if you click on http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/finance-and-investment/oecd-pensions-outlook-2012_9789264169401-en;jsessionid=59e703gs7dp1s.x-oecd-live-01. Someone has put a lot of work into all this; everything a policy wonk could possibly need to know about the international pensions scene, with lots of material ready to hand, ready to be shipped into policy papers and passed off as one's own stuff.

Perhaps the Guardian has heaps of interns (unpaid) reading it all and turning it into suitable size gobbets to pad out the rag on days when news is slow or when all the journos. have hangovers or worse and when more topical or more lively copy is not to be had.

Perhaps pensions finance will be the hot topic for aspiring statisticians for a while, giving them a break from the well worked topic of housing finance, the stuff from which the great global recession of 2008-2012 was made. Can I smell gloom and doom on the horizon once more?

PS: one might also try higher up the tree at http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/. Pensions is not the only fruit on offer.