Toward a Sustainable Pension System

This article presents a pension plan model aimed at maintaining the resilience of a nation’s social security infrastructure and ensuring retirees’ welfare. The aging population, labor market shifts, legislative changes, and unexpected economic crises (including the COVID-19 pandemic) have created distortions between annuity expenditures and national income. Many countries are experiencing rising life expectancy and in turn increasing public pressure to ensure a dignified existence for the growing elder population. This is challenging decision-makers and government-supervised pension funds to strengthen the financial soundness and solvency, stability, and distributive equity of public and supervised private annuity systems. We present a three-tier pension model that is unique because it is implemented in a small OECD country, and its implementation is flexible and changes according to the country’s demographic and financial changes. The presented model can be used as an example by other countries facing similar problems in their pension systems.