L'avenir des régimes publics de retraite dans les pays du G7

Abstract

The future of public pensions in the seven major economies Thierry Chauveau, Rahim Loufir In most OECD countries, the financing of the current public Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) pension system may become quite worrisome due to the likely ageing of the population. This article provides an analysis of the consequences of the demographie transition on the equilibrium of the public pensions systems in the seven major economies. A new CGEM-OG model is used, which rules out the well known weakness of earlier models : the simulated age structure (and total population) do not coincide with the actual ones. For each of the seven countries, main macroeconomic aggregates, intergenerational transfers, and welfare criteria are analysed. Our conclusions are somewhat different from those based on other methodologies such standard CGEM-OG or econometric or generational accounting models. The main conclusions are that (i) Ageing of the population is a problem very similar from one developed country to another ; (ii) This problem is not so much worrying as is sometimes suggested and policies in which PAYG financing is maintained and the retirement age held constant are allowable ; (iii) There is no « one best social security policy » ; (iv) On the contrary, there is a trade-off between, on the one hand, lowering interest rates, increasing investment and output, lowering taxes,... and, on the other hand, increasing the standard of living of the retired, and (v) Most of these results still hold with the polar assumption of small open economies. Nevertheless, for countries in which the domestic real rate of interest is higher than the American one, opening the economy leads to better macroeconomic outeomes and higher actuarial fairness. It is the case for France and the United Kingdom ; the opposite situation characterizes Japan.