This paper discusses the mechanics and regulation of participating and unit-linked variable payout annuities. These annuities offer benefits that are not fixed in either nominal or real terms but depend...
This book examines recent changes in the landscape of retirement products and annuity markets in five countries. All the selected countries (Australia, Chile, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland) have mandatory...
This paper examines the policy issues, constraints and options facing policymakers in promoting the development of sound markets for retirement products. It discusses the various risks faced by pensioners...
This paper provides a comparative summary of the payout phase of pension systems in five countries -- Australia, Chile, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland. All five countries have large pension systems with...
Over the past decade or so, most Central and Eastern European countries have reformed their pension systems, significantly downsizing their public pillars and creating private pillars based on capitalization...
The expansion of deposit insurance and introduction of debt guarantees have played a crucial role in containing the financial crisis while giving governments time to develop suitable policy responses...
The Danish ATP (Arbejdmarkedets TillaegsPension or Labor Market Supplementary Pension) fund is a public pension fund that was created in 1964 to complement the universal pension benefit that is financed...
Public pension funds have the potential to benefit from low operating costs because they enjoy economies of scale and avoid large marketing costs. But this important advantage has in most countries been...
The main purpose of this paper is to examine the growing use of derivatives by Danish pension institutions as a risk management tool to hedge embedded options on their balance sheets. Throughout the 1980s...
The report covers several types of structured finance with such capital market instruments as mortgage-backed securities, structured bond issues for infrastructure financing, securitization of small and...
This is the second volume of a study on the insights from a 12-country pilot program on public debt management and domestic government debt market development. The discussion of domestic government debt...
Greece and Italy initiated efforts to improve public debt management and develop their domestic debt markets respectively in the late 1970s and mid-1980s. At that time, both countries suffered from large...
The Jordanian insurance market has been free from extensive state ownership and pervasive premium, product, investment, and reinsurance controls. However, these positive features have been marred by the...
Leading financial economists have proposed the use of international asset swaps (Merton 1990, Bodie and Merton 2002) as a way of efficiently achieving international diversification without eroding the...
With few exceptions, mainly in Asia, mutual funds grew explosively in most countries around the world during the 1990s. Equity funds predominated in Anglo-American countries while bond funds predominated...
Mauritius belongs to a select group of developing countries where contractual savings-savings with insurance companies and pension funds-exceed 40 percent of GDP and represent a major potential force in...
The insurance industry is relatively well developed. It makes extensive use of reinsurance facilities and is free from the pervasive premium, product, investment, and reinsurance controls that have bedeviled...
The author argues that public and private pillars are essential for a well-functioning pension system. Public pillars, funded or unfounded, offer basic benefits that are independent of the performance...
What is the most cost-effective way to organize individual accounts that are part of a mandatory social security system? Defined-contribution individual account components of social security systems are...
Pension reforms normally focus on the accumulation phase, plus term insurance that provides bnefits for the disabled and for dependent survivors, all of which are immediate concerns. Decumulation of the...