Pension Reform: A Short Guide

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This book is an abridgement of Barr and Diamond's Reforming Pensions: Principles and Policy Choices (OUP, 2008). It begins with the introduction to the earlier book, includes the concluding chapters to the sections on principles and on policy choices and the concluding policy chapter to the book. It summarizes the Chile and China chapters into a section of five pages. It presents material from some of the boxes of the longer book. While the longer book remains as a definitive and detailed analysis of pension reform, this new, shorter book conveys the message and conclusions to policy makers, journalists writing for the general public, and students being introduced to social security and other pension policy. The topic being condensed and summarized here is described at length in the earlier book. It stems from rapidly changing economic conditions and dramatic increases in life expectancy. Newspaper headlines across the globe anticipate again and again a massive rupture of social security and retirement systems. With public fears on the rise, officials in many countries under pressure to solve problems quickly are turning their backs on traditional pay-as-you-go systems in favor of privately financed retirement plans. Barr and Diamond demonstrate that in the age of globalization these problems are no longer simply domestic problems. Because trade borders are becoming increasingly open and digital transactions are hastily erasing national economic boundaries, countries are no longer able to act independently in setting pension policies. These problems are particularly exacerbated in China, a state where massive restructuring of state-owned enterprises and comparatively recent dynamic entry into global markets have already taxed a system whose enormous burden is to support the retirement of the world's largest national population. The authors address these issues comprehensively in athorough survey of pension economic principles and application to China.