Meta-partnerships across the economy: A cross-sector partnership approach to the retirement welfare crisis - a two country case comparison

Description

There is wide agreement that the aging populations of the developed world threaten to impose an ever-growing tax burden for pension, health and social support on the reducing working proportion of the population. Different economies, by design or happenstance, have pursued to greater or lesser extents different solutions in response to the gradual crystallising of the rising burden of unfunded retirement obligations, which are a combination of legal and social obligation on governments. Each economy has its own history, faces alternative demographic shifts and has sought to pull different levers to alleviate the approaching unreasonable burden or the alternative of unreasonable poverty for many in their later years.

This paper compares the approaches to this funding problem of the governments of two countries, the UK and New Zealand, which have some clear similarities. Specifically, the paper examines the introduction and management by the governments of pension saving schemes, which seek to mandate contributions from both the commercial sector and personal sector, which have the aim of partially filling the perceived gap in saving provision. It focuses on the complex differing priorities of each of the economy sectors involved—corporate, personal and government—and examines these two attempts to address what many would see as a shared societal problem.