ABSTRACT
The goal of pension policy is to provide an income for people no longer in work; however, the discussion often focuses on public finance rather than people. While it is understandable that policy-makers want to concentrate attention on payments that are the single biggest claim on public expenditure (Chand and Jaeger, 1995; OECD, 2005), a pension is not a person. It is a categoric error to assume that the money that the state’s social security programme pays an individual each month is his or her sole source of income. It is even more misleading to regard it as the sole source of income of a household.
