Blogs

Post-retirement work has become more common in Finland and in other countries in recent years. Older people who continue working after retirement have been found to be happier and healthier than those who are not working. This blog clarifies the association between post-retirement work and life satisfaction in Finland. The results are based on a postal survey conducted by the Finnish Centre for Pension in the autumn of 2017.

Providing also future generations of EU citizens with adequate pensions requires a holistic approach. Commonly agreed indicators play a key role in monitoring pensioners’ economic well-being and developing targeted policy measures.

While negotiations to form a new Finnish government are ongoing, various commentators are pleading for the new government to be ambitious in its goals to raise employment levels. Only the question is: whose employment levels and by what measure? Some groups in Finnish society are doing well when compared the same groups in other countries, …

Pensions are intergenerational contracts. In recent decades, many European countries have witnessed low fertility rates, which has put pressure on that contract. Although many assume that they have paid their own pension, this is not the case. When we pay pension contributions, we mostly pay the pensions of the previous generation. Only on a minor …

Is the Finnish pension scheme in debt as only 29 per cent of its liabilities are covered by investment assets? Looking at it from another angle, the funding balance is 98 per cent. How can the figures be so different?

We recently updated our comparative data representing the size of pension funds in different countries in relation to the country’s GDP. We included funds of both statutory (1st pillar) and occupational (2nd pillar) pension schemes. As a reader’s guide we would like to briefly explain some of the different funding mechanisms. 1. Liquidity funds Every …

In its latest pension reform, Finland relaxed the rules for retirement, giving people more freedom to combine work and retirement. By introducing a new partial pension, Finland is following the old-age pension scheme design of Sweden and Norway. So far, the experiences from all three countries indicate that people want to combine work and retirement …

Pensioners in Europe have considerably more money to spend today than in the early 2000s. The poverty rate has gone down by around 20%, and the gap in income between pensioners and working-age people has become narrower. These are all good news about pensioners’ economic welfare in Europe. But if we look at this from …

It is said that one of the core values of Europe is diversity. This certainly holds true when looking at pension systems. There is such a diversity of actors, financing mechanisms as well as public-private mixes that it is easy to conclude that Europe embraces diversity as much in its pension systems as in its …

Countries that pay more attention to human capital development and capacitating policies throughout the life course, and not just at the tail end of working life, are successful in extending working lives. This is the main finding of our recent comparative study (pdf), pointing to the long-term effects of social policy on the whole. The reversal …