With an output of 11 reports during the 2020–2022 triennium, the Technical Commission on Invalidity, Old Age and Survivors (TC Pension) has produced important knowledge for the design and implementation of future pensions schemes. It has also shared its knowledge actively through the participation in several ISSA events.
With its broad membership, TC Pension is well placed to deal with issues related to the provision of invalidity, old age and survivors’ benefits, and the consequences of ageing populations – for individuals, social security institutions and society as a whole. In the framework of the current triennium, the TC Pension has worked on 11 reports in relation to the priorities set by the International Social Security Association (ISSA) during the triennium. Three reports that deal with hot topics for pension schemes are already available:
- The report How to design survivor benefits in the 21st century? establishes a link between the improvement of women's professional careers and the reduced need to develop survivors' pensions. Nevertheless, this varies greatly from one country to another, and survivors' pensions remain in many cases the best way to prevent elderly women from falling below the poverty line.
- The report Return-to-work incentives and supports for persons on long-term disability concludes that working income thresholds should not be set too low to ensure a good incentive to return to work.
- The report Optimal combination of the public old-age income security system concludes that it is necessary to develop pensions that are sufficient to ensure a decent standard of living for pensioners and proposes various ways of financing them.
The remaining eight reports will be published in connection with the upcoming World Social Security Forum. Among them will be a report on migration, which will stress that since migrants are often younger than the average population this can allow, at least initially, for an improvement in the financial balance of pension schemes.
Members of the technical commission have also presented dozens of good practices in the framework of the ISSA regional social security forums, and the 16th ISSA International Conference on Information and Communication Technology in Social Security (ICT 2022) in a session on inter-organisational coordination – blockchain and data exchange. Finally, TC Pension has contributed to a number ISSA webinars on old-age pensions, and organized in March 2022 a webinar on how to ensure the protection of survivors in a changing world.
Issues related to invalidity, old age and survivors’ pensions will continue to be of key importance for social security administrations in the years ahead. The work undertaken by TC Pension in the last few years will be valuable for the design and implementation of such schemes in the future.
