IDG can provide a comprehensive range of assistance in the area of pension reform, addressing fiscal, social, legal, regulatory, institutional, and political issues:
- Strategic advice to senior policymakers in identifying and quantifying the key problems of a pension system, and choosing a politically feasible reform to resolve fiscal problems and build strong institutions.
- Developing modeling capacity in Government and NGOs to support reform, as well as ongoing operations of funded and unfunded pension organizations. (Modeling work develops an overlapping-generations accounting model of the demographics and financial flows of the pension system, projected into the future, with which it is possible to evaluate population aging, changes in fiscal balances, implicit pension liabilities, impacts on labor markets and capital formation, and allocation of transition costs across generations and population subgroups. Training in modeling and in actuarial science can be provided.)
- Drafting comprehensive laws and regulations, or revising existing laws and regulations to reflect best international practices and to maintain consistency with other institutions.
- Advising on all aspects of investment of pension assets: designing strong institutions and a regulatory framework, choosing asset managers and custodians, designing investment principles.
- Administrative and institutional reforms of pension structures to increase efficiency, cut costs, and improve service delivery, while taking advantage of available financial sector capacity.
- Coordination of pension reform with privatization, tax and expenditure policy, and capital market and insurance development.
- Issues in disability and survivor pension benefits.
- Advising on IT issues for unfunded and funded pension systems .
- Organization of seminars for senior policymakers to consider reform options, for targeted population groups to provide technical training or present reform ideas, and for politically influential population groups to assess opinions.
- Public education to present ideas to the population and build broad-based support for reform.
IDG advisors aim to assist governments with both aspects of a successful pension reform — getting the policy directions theoretically correct, and then addressing all the details of implementation so that the theory is achieved in practice.