Does pension debt mean anything after all?

Beltrametti, Luca and Della Valle, Matteo (2011): Does pension debt mean anything after all?

Abstract

We discuss the meaning of the concept of implicit pension debt (unfunded pen-sion liabilities) from a public finance perspective and contrast different definitions such a variable with the notion of public debt. We conclude that the implicit pen-sion is deeply different from public debt but nevertheless is meaningful for eco-nomic policy. We compute the implicit pension debt associated to retired workers for several countries for different years adopting a homogeneous algorithm. Our results show that the major countries have implicit pension debt of very different size with different trends in the last few years.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Pension liabilities, implicit debt, sovereign debt.
• Subjects: H - Public Economics > H5 - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies > H55 - Social Security and Public Pensions; H - Public Economics > H6 - National Budget, Deficit, and Debt > H63 - Debt ; Debt Management ; Sovereign Debt

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