出版社：Suntory Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines
摘要：This paper analyses the proposals contained in the Government Green Paper, A New Contract for Welfare: Partnership in Pensions for low paid workers and the potential of the new rules to guarantee a decent income in old age. It discusses the general principles inherent in the design of the British pension system and analyses the balance of these principles is represented in the Green paper. The paper then examines how the Government’s proposals protect individuals from a means-tested old age. The paper identifies a number of design faults that could extend means-testing to a large number of low paid workers. The paper then models lifetime incomes for a range of hypothetical, low-income individuals and their partners under the Green Paper’s proposals. This paper finds that the Green Paper’s proposals add up to reinventing a new two-stage basic pension. However, two key features of such a basic pension package are missing – an ‘adequate’ level of payment and comprehensive entitlement. Because of these missing principles we argue that the Green Paper’s proposals incorporate tightropes and tripwires for the low paid. The tightrope is an income from the basic pension and the secondary pension which is so near the meanstested minimum that little is gained in retirement from a lifetime of work and contribution. Tripwires exist because common life events that disrupt basic and secondary pension entitlement are not covered by the Green Paper’s proposals. These tripwires include periods of unemployment, sickness or training, extended periods of caring, time below the low earnings limit and bereavement. The paper expresses concerns about incentive problems the sustainability of the proposals, the robustness of the assumptions about family formation and labour market participation and the sensitivity of the low paid to fluctuations in the annuity markets. The authors make several suggestions about changes to the proposals that could meet their concerns
