期刊名称：DIW Diskussionspapiere / Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Berlin
出版年度：2008
卷号：2008
出版社：Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Berlin
摘要：In several OECD countries, public pay-as-you-go financed pension systems have
undergone major reforms in which future retirement benefit promises have been
scaled down. A consequence of these reforms is that especially in countries with
a tight tax-benefit linkage, the retirement benefit claims of low-income workers
might not even exceed the minimum income guarantee which the government provides
the aged. Recently, some German politicians have criticized this likely
development because it was unjust that persons who have paid contributions over
a long working life end up with no higher benefits than people who have never
worked or paid any contributions. However, the government defended the current
retirement benefit formula with the argument that every Euro paid as
contributions had exactly the same value in generating future retirement
benefits. But this logic has been questioned recently, e.g. by Breyer and
Hupfeld (2009), since the value of a contributed Euro depends on the life
expectancy of the individual, which is positively correlated with annual income.
In that earlier paper, we introduced the concept of "distributive neutrality",
which takes income-group-specific differences in life expectancy into account.
The present paper estimates the relationship between annual earnings and life
expectancy of German retirees empirically and shows how the formula that links
benefits to contributions would have to be modified to achieve distributive
neutrality. We compare the new formula to the benefit formulas in other OECD
countries and analyze a data set provided by the German Pension Insurance Office
on a large cohort of pensioners to find out how the old-age poverty rate would
be affected by the proposed change of the benefit formula. Finally, we discuss
other possible effects of a change in the benefit formula, especially on the
labour supply of different earnings groups.
关键词：Social security, life expectancy, poverty, redistribution
