A History of the German Public Pension System: Continuity amid Change provides the first comprehensive institutional history of the German public pension system from its origins in the late nineteenth century to the major reform period in the early twenty-first century. Relying on a wide range sources, including many used for the first time, this study provides a balanced account of how the pension system has coped with major challenges, such as Germany’s defeat in two world wars, inflation, the Great Depression, the demographic transition, political risk, reunification, and changing gender roles. It shows that while the pension system has changed to meet all of these challenges, it has retained basic characteristics—particularly the tie between work, contributions, and benefits—that fundamentally define its character and have enabled it to survive economic and political turmoil for over a century. This book also demonstrates that the most serious challenge faced by the pension system has consistently been political intervention by leaders hoping to use it for purposes unrelated to its mission of providing the insured with secure and adequate retirement income.
"Describes the German pension system as it has shaped the labor market until about the year 2000" and "describes the three staged reform process." - abstract.
Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject Economics - Finance, grade: 1,3, Humboldt-University of Berlin, 13 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The paper discusses the evolution and reform of the German public pension plan in respect to its history, theoretical approaches to explain the choice and evolution of pension plans and takes current issues in account in order to evaluate the suggestions made and to show what political determinants influence future reform. Part 1 of this paper will give a short review of the history of the German public pension plan between the late 19th century and today. Part 2 will show how decisions made in the past could be explained and will use political approaches to explain the choice and evolution of pension schemes and pension reform. Part 3 of this paper will then consider the current problems faced by the pension system and will discuss different proposals made. It will consider the current situation of the German public pension plan and will use political determinants in order to examine how the future reform of the public pension fund in Germany could develop. A small critique will be given at the end.
The German pension system was the first formal pension system in the world, designed by Bismarck nearly 120 years ago. It has been very successful in providing high and reliable pension levels at reasonable contribution rates. While the generosity of the German pension system is considered a great social achievement, negative incentive effects of past reforms in the 1970s and 1980s and population aging are threatening the very core of the system. This has led to fundamental pension reforms since 1992. Based on a detailed simulation model of the German pension system, this book provides a thorough assessment of the system and its reforms. It shows that the latest reforms have put the system back onto a stable path and moved it from the old monolithic towards a multi-pillar system.
Germany still has a very generous public pay-as-you-go pension system. It is characterized by early effective retirement ages and very high effective replacement rates. Most workers receive virtually all of their retirement income from this public retirement insurance. Costs are almost 12% of GDP, more than 2.5 times as much as the U.S. Social Security System. The pressures exerted by population aging on this monolithic system, amplified by negative incentive effects, have induced a reform process that began in 1992 and is still ongoing. This paper has two parts. Part A describes the German pension system as it has shaped the labor market from 1972 until today. Part B describes the reform process, which will convert the exemplary and monolithic Bismarckian public insurance system to a complex multi-pillar system. We provide a survey of the main features of the future German retirement system introduced by the so called "Riester Reform" in 2001 and an assessment in how far this last reform step will solve the pressing problems of the German system of old age provision.
The aging society and threatening old-age poverty are two major political topics in Germany for the next decades. Many modern employment biographies consist of atypical employment and discontinuities; both negatively impact the pension entitlements of the individuals. This work develops an inninnovative approach that offers flexibility to absorb demographic changes as well as labor market developments, without threatening the financial stability of the public pension scheme.
Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2011 in the subject Politics - Political Systems - Germany, grade: 1,0, University of applied sciences, Düsseldorf, course: Economics - MBA, Master of Business Administration, language: English, abstract: This paper surveys the situation of the German pension system after a sequence of reforms which started as a fully funded system implemented by Bismarck during the 1880s, with a mandatory retirement age of 70 years when male life expectancy at birth was less than 45 years. Today, life expectancy for men is more than 80 years. After a long and arduous debate in the German Bundestag, agreements on a comprehensive pension reform resulted in the pension reform of 1957, which mainly established changes such as the normal retirement age at 65, the retirement at the age of 60 for elderly unemployed, the retirement for women at the age of 60 and, at last, the introduction of dynamic benefits indexed to gross wages which had an immediate impact on the economic wellness of current retirees. Thereafter, the 1972 reform made the German pension system one of the most generous of the world, as it mainly opened the public pension insurance system to all workers with generous terms for back-payment of contributions and eased the terms and conditions for early retirement by the implementation of the so-called 'flexible retirement', as discussed in chapter 1 of this paper. The following pension reforms discussed in this paper are the "Riester reform" of 2001 with the following main objectives: the sustainability of contribution rates in order to secure the long-term stability of pension levels and the spread of supplementary private pension savings, and continuing with the efforts of the Rürup commission which culminated in the "Rürup reform" of 2004 which the objective to stabilize contribution rates while at the same time ensuring appropriate future pension levels. Based on the above, it can be concluded that on the whole the sequence o
Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2011 in the subject Politics - Political Systems - Germany, grade: 1,0, University of applied sciences, Düsseldorf, course: Economics - MBA, Master of Business Administration, language: English, abstract: This paper surveys the situation of the German pension system after a sequence of reforms which started as a fully funded system implemented by Bismarck during the 1880s, with a mandatory retirement age of 70 years when male life expectancy at birth was less than 45 years. Today, life expectancy for men is more than 80 years. After a long and arduous debate in the German Bundestag, agreements on a comprehensive pension reform resulted in the pension reform of 1957, which mainly established changes such as the normal retirement age at 65, the retirement at the age of 60 for elderly unemployed, the retirement for women at the age of 60 and, at last, the introduction of dynamic benefits indexed to gross wages which had an immediate impact on the economic wellness of current retirees. Thereafter, the 1972 reform made the German pension system one of the most generous of the world, as it mainly opened the public pension insurance system to all workers with generous terms for back-payment of contributions and eased the terms and conditions for early retirement by the implementation of the so-called ‘flexible retirement’, as discussed in chapter 1 of this paper. The following pension reforms discussed in this paper are the “Riester reform” of 2001 with the following main objectives: the sustainability of contribution rates in order to secure the long-term stability of pension levels and the spread of supplementary private pension savings, and continuing with the efforts of the Rürup commission which culminated in the “Rürup reform” of 2004 which the objective to stabilize contribution rates while at the same time ensuring appropriate future pension levels. Based on the above, it can be concluded that on the whole the sequence of pension reforms in Germany has successfully converted what was once a so called monolithic Bismarckian public insurance system to an efficient multi-pillar. Given this situation, as discussed in chapter 2 of this paper, the German pension system nowadays are based in a three-pillar system, consisting of the following elements: The first and most important pillar is universal and mandatory, organized as a pay-as-you-go system. The second pillar is the voluntary occupational pension system which is also universal and mandatory, but capital funded. The third pillar is also capital funded, but organized as a voluntary private provision system.
Enjoying time after a busy life with a good pension - that's the dream of us all. And we deserve it after all the hard work. However, for many people, their pension is no longer enough. There are reasons for this, as author Helmut Harter shows us in his book "The biggest sponsors of the German state are the working population and pensioners", and these are mainly due to political decisions: On the one hand, politicians are always happy to reach into the pension fund to finance extraneous benefits with the contributions of the compulsorily insured, such as German unification. On the other hand, not all working people are compulsorily insured, but only the middle and lower incomes. A plea for a solidary and transparent pension system!
Recently, policy debate and comparative research on old-age pensions have focused on the financial sustainability of pension systems in the face of demographic change. This study, however, also takes into account distributional effects involved in pension system structures. Theoretical, institutional and empirical analyses are combined to form a comprehensive framework for evaluating financial sustainability and distributional effects of the pension systems implemented in Germany and the United Kingdom. Along with projections of demographic trends and future public pension expenditure, the empirical results on old-age incomes and their distribution allow for identifying a number of reform options for each pension system to improve their financial or distributional results.
