Fair pensions and population ageing
Demographic changes in survival rates and age structures require adaptions in public policies. This grant will produce a social benefit by providing policy makers with two kinds of tools that they will need to make these adaptions, fair normal pension ages and consistently up-to-date measures of population ageing that take the changing characteristics of populations into account. An important area of adaption is national pension policy. Recently changes in pension policies have been driven by financial considerations and have aroused a great deal of dissent. One reason for the unhappiness with proposed pension reforms is that they place the burden of reform inequitably. People generally dislike inequitable policies. In this grant, we will produce a detailed case study of equitable pension ages. In the ReAgeing project we dealt with fairness in a very general framework. In this grant, we present an innovative methodology that produces scenarios of equitable normal pension ages using the details of a specific pension system. This grant shows how fairness can enter public policy discussions of ageing.
In the future, new problems with respect to population ageing could arise and new data will certainly become available. In the ReAgeing grant, we produced many new measures of population ageing that took the changing characteristics of populations, such as remaining life expectancy and health into account. Our presentations were based on data that were available at the time of writing. In order for the results of the ReAgeing grant to remain relevant requires a second innovation, a way to keep the new measures of population ageing up-to-date. We do this with two pieces of software that can immediately be updated every time the UN produces a new round of data. We cannot predict exactly how demographic conditions will change. With these pieces of software, we can be sure that we will have the tools to deal with them.