The Retirement Plans and Expectations of Non-retired Canadians Aged 45 to 59
This study examines retirement issues for older working Canadians: income, pension coverage, home ownership status, immigration status, marital status and self-assessed health. It uses data from the 2002 General Social Survey.
Retirement plan awareness
N ADDITION TO WAGES, many employees receive benefits such as dental, life or supplemental medical insurance plans. Employer-sponsored retirement plans—registered pension plans (RPPs), group RRSPs and deferred profit-sharing plans—are another key component of total compensation. During the mid-1990s, firms were thought to be moving from defined-benefit registered pension plans toward defined-contribution arrangements—particu- larly group RRSPs—because RPPs were more costly to administer and subject to substantial regulation. While subsequent examination showed the death of defined-benefit plans to be greatly exaggerated (Frenken 1996), the growing popularity of group RRSPs presents employees with a greater variety of employer-sponsored retirement plans than in the past. But, can all employees make the distinction between RPPs and group RRSPs? How many think they have a RPP even though their employer does not provide one? How many mistakenly think they have a group RRSP? Most important, how many think they have at least one of the two but, in fact, have neither? Accurate information about one's employer-spon- sored retirement plan is crucial in deciding the timing of retirement, the role personal savings will play, and the allocation of one's portfolio between safe and risky investments. Such information is especially important since, contrary to many RPPs, group RRSPs require workers to decide whether to participate and if so, how much to contribute. Using the Workplace and Employee Survey (WES), this article first reviews trends in RPP coverage over the last decade and provides estimates of workers with group RRSPs (see Data source). It then examines how well full-time permanent employees in the private sector understood their coverage in an employer-
The Use of Qualitative Information in Macro-Economic Policy Analysis
The majority of macro-economic policy models takes for granted that conflicts among objectives can be assessed by means of a tradeoff analysis. Such tradeoffs imply that sacrifices and benefits of various impacts of decisions can be measured on a cardinal scale, so that a conventional macro-economic utility or welfare analysis can be applied.