Does pension debt mean anything after all?

We discuss the meaning of the concept of implicit pension debt (unfunded pen-sion liabilities) from a public finance perspective and contrast different definitions such a variable with the notion of public debt. We conclude that the implicit pen-sion is deeply different from public debt but nevertheless is meaningful for eco-nomic policy. We compute the implicit pension debt associated to retired workers for several countries for different years adopting a homogeneous algorithm. Our results show that the major countries have implicit pension debt of very different size with different trends in the last few years.