Public Pension Reforms and Fiscal Foresight: Narrative Evidence and Aggregate Implications

Abstract

Many OECD countries have significantly increased spending on public pensions over the last half-century. As more retirees begin to draw benefits, policymakers have placed more focus on retrenchment reforms in order to keep the pension systems solvent. In this summary article of working paper 2008, Sarah Zubairy, along with coauthor Huixin Bi, construct a new data set that documents changes in pension policy spending since 1967, then studies the effects of long-term structural reforms on retirement decisions and pension spending.