The dynamics of pension reform

Sammanfattning: This thesis consists of three essays, which all concern the dynamics of pension reform. The first essay evaluates the financial balance and the demographic adjustability of the reformed Swedish pay-as-you-go pension system. The main findings are that the demographic adjustability of the system is poor. Furthermore, the financial balance and pension levels are, to a large degree, dependent on the pension fund and its returns. Making some alterations to the system's benefit formula may improve the adjustability of the system, as well as decreasing its pension fund dependency. It is also shown that the new public system imposes an age-dependent implicit tax on labor earnings that is falling with age. Within the pay-as-you-go system, this tax is large for younger workers for whom almost the whole contribution is regarded as a tax. By introducing a public defined contribution system, the total implicit tax may be reduced since the defined contribution system implies a negative implicit tax because savings are subsidized within the defined contribution system.In the second essay a three-generation OLG model for analyzing a privatization of PAYG old-age social security is developed. Furthermore, it proposes an explicit reform for how the privatization transition may be undertaken. The set of government policy instruments is limited to debt issuing and proportional labor income taxation. The possibilities of a Pareto-improving privatization, given the proposed reform, are then analyzed. Contrary to models where a two-generation OLG framework is used, the three-generation framework creates possibilities for a Pareto-improving privatization of old-age social security, since the PAYG system induces a non-optimal implicit tax over the life cycle. By shifting to an optimal tax policy cannot only the pension claims accrued under the PAYG system be financed, but the shift will also be Pareto-improving.In the third essay the performance of the reformed Latvian pay-as-you-go pension system is evaluated against the background of an exceptional projected decrease in the Latvian labor force. The pension system is designed to handle the upcoming difficulties, and special attention has been given in the design to keep the expenditures low relative to the revenues, by introducing rules dampening the increase in the pension expenditures. In the light of the pessimistic projection of the Latvian demography, the newly reformed PAYG system performs remarkably well. The expenditure reducing rules introduced have significant effects on the system's financial balance. The pension reform also includes the launch of a publicly run defined contributions pension system. It is shown that the resulting implicit tax imposed by the public pension system imposes on labor earnings is negative and increasing with age. That is, savings are subsidized in the public pension system. It is also shown that private savings are fully crowded out as individuals try to offset their savings in the pension system. Since individuals are capital constrained, they will have no private assets at all. From a welfare perspective, this suggests the overall contribution rate to the public pension system to be too high.