Appraising the Financial Sustainability of a Pension System with Signal Processing

Abstract

One key issue of the Spanish pension system is its financial sustainability in regard to slumping fertility rate and rising longevity of the Spanish population. The paper presents a versatile and robust model that may help pension managers gain insight into the future Spanish pyramid of ages, from which they will appraise cash inflows and outflows of the pension system. The model forecasts ninety years of the Spanish population for each cohort of the pyramid of ages. Borrowed from the signal processing discipline, the model relies on the Burg method which fits a pth order autoregressive (AR) model to the input signal by minimizing (least squares) the forward and backward prediction errors while constrai-ning the AR parameters to satisfy the Levinson-Durbin recursión, then uses an infinite impulse response prediction error filter. Results add better perspective and insight to the Spanish population projection forecasted by the United Nations Population Division.