Date of publication
11 June 2012

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It may not feel like it, but today’s retirees are living through what might prove to have been a golden age for pensions and pensioners. Far fewer older people live in poverty than in the past: about a quarter fewer than in the mid-1980s. They also can expect to live longer.

Today’s and tomorrow’s workers, in contrast, will have to work longer before retiring and have smaller public pensions. Their private pensions are much more likely to be of the defined-contribution type, meaning that individuals are more directly exposed to investment risk and themselves bear the pension cost of living longer.

This edition of the OECD Pensions Outlook examines the changing pensions landscape. It looks at pension reform during the crisis and beyond, the design of automatic adjustment mechanisms, reversals of systemic pension reforms in Central and Eastern Europe, coverage of private pension systems and guarantees in defined contribution pension systems. It closes with a policy roadmap for defined contribution pensions and a statistical annex.

Further reading

• Pensions Markets in Focus
• Global Pensions Statistics
• Pensions at a Glance 2011: Retirement-Income Systems in OECD Countries 
• Mortality and Life Expectancy - Longevity Risk
• Retirement Savings Adequacy
• Pensions Outlook 2012: Chapter 4 Spanish translation: Cobertura de planes privados de pensiones: evidencia y opciones de política