Fair shares and grey matters - by Hamish McRae
"The financial pressures generated by the gradual ageing of Western societies are now widely recognised, even if the action taken to cope with these pressures has been fragmented and maybe even perverse. Obviously, pension provision is one of the key issues, though by no means the only one, for finding ways of persuading people to stay longer in the workforce will be equally important. In a sense, the problems of ageing are welcome - few of us would really wish people to die younger - but they need tackling all the same. So what should be done? Different developed countries have chosen a different balance between private sector and state provision, but all have some mixture of these. In the US and some European countries such as the UK, the Netherlands and Switzerland, the emphasis has been on the private sector carrying a large part of the burden. In much of the rest of continental Europe, the taxpayer will have to bear a larger portion of the costs.
There are some interesting modifications to this, such as compulsory saving, pioneered in Singapore and proposed by the Turner Commission for the UK. But, basically, people either save for their own pensions, through a company scheme or on their own, or they rely on the generosity of future taxpayers."
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