Friday, December 4, 2015

What the U.S. can learn from Chile’s retirement system

Orazio Attanasio, Costas Meghir and Olivia S. Mitchell write about their experience on Chile’s Bravo Commission, which examined potential reforms to Chile’s famous (or infamous) personal accounts retirement plan.

Chile’s pension system has been touted as “best practice” by policymakers and researchers around the world. The nation’s funded and regulated private pension funds called Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones (AFPs) and financed by workers’ mandatory 10% contributions, has now accumulated over $160 billion in privately-managed accounts. AFPs cover about 10 million affiliates, and provide retirement benefits to more than a million retirees.

Chile’s system, however, is not perfect. Many workers retire with no or very low pensions, mostly because their participation into the formal labor market had been occasional and their contributions low.

Click here to read the whole article.

2 comments:

JoeTheEconomist said...

Andrew, The Chilean system is nearly 35 years old. If it is so great, why hasn't anyone else mirrored their system. I think Poland tried to privatize its system in 1999. How did that work-out? How much of Chile's success stems from timing? It converted to personal accounts pretty much on the day that the greatest bull market in history started.

Andrew G. Biggs said...

Short story, others have: "To date, more than 30 countries have established some form of individual accounts in their retirement systems." This study is a bit dated, but gives some details: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v66n1/v66n1p31.html