Romain Despalins, OECD Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs

to Pensions Markets in Focus. Investment losses resulting from the financial crisis have been recouped in almost all reporting OECD countries. However, the low-interest rate environment continues to exert pressure on pension providers through lower yields on the bond portion of their portfolio investments, which may affect their ability to maintain promises to plan members. This has given rise to concerns that pension providers could increase their exposure to riskier investments in a search for potential higher yield.

Funded and private pension arrangements continued to expand in countries such as Australia, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands where pension assets exceeded the size of the GDP. This reflects a trend which has seen pension assets grow faster than GDP in most countries over the last decade. This trend is most pronounced in countries with large private pension markets.

Pension providers experienced positive real investment rates of return, net of investment expenses, in 2016 in 28 of the 31 reporting OECD countries and 25 of the 32 reporting non-OECD jurisdictions. These rates of investment return were above 2% on average both inside and outside the OECD area. Annual returns were also positive over the last decade in most countries, with the highest average annual real investment rates of return (net of investment expenses) observed in the Dominican Republic (6.3%), Colombia (5.8%) and Slovenia (5.2%).

This new OECD report on trends in the financial performance of private pension plans covers 85 countries. It assesses the amount of assets in funded and private pension plans, describes the way these assets are invested in financial markets, and looks at how investments have performed, both in the past year and over the past decade.

References and links

Read the report at www.oecd.org/pensions/pensionmarketsinfocus.htm

Read the OECD Observer’s roundtable on pensions at http://oe.cd/25M

Visit http://www.oecd.org/finance/private-pensions/