Increases in longevity, changes in pension structure, and the shift to greater individual responsibility for retirement saving make it important that governments provide workers with information about their public retirement benefits. Public pension statements are one way governments can do...

Using an overlapping generations model, two new indicators of public pension system sustainability are proposed: the pension space, which measures the capacity to pay for pension expenditures out of labour taxation, and the pension space exhaustion probability reflecting demographic...

This essay describes the current debate on reforming Social Security in the US, along with a brief description of how the program works. Along the way it comments on the quality of some proposed reform proposals as well as their political standing. Where issues are similar, some inferences are...

This paper is about public sector pensions, an issue that has become increasingly contentious in a number of countries in recent years, including in the United Kingdom. In the UK the public debate has focussed on the perceived generosity of these pensions, which, it is often claimed, contrasts...

The Canadian social assistance system is applauded for reducing poverty among the elderly. This paper profiles the Canadian system, compares the system to the U.S. Supplemental Security Income program, reviews the consequences for elderly poverty rates, assesses system costs, and then comments...

For policy reforms to increase a society's welfare, reliable information on people's preferences and expectations is crucial. Representative opinion polls, often involving simplifed questions about the complex topics under debate, are an important source of information for both policy-makers and...

For policy reforms to increase a society's welfare, reliable information on people's prefer-ences and expectations is crucial. Representative opinion polls, often involving simplified questions about the complex topics under debate, are an important source of information for both policy-makers...