ABSTRACT
We live in an ageing world – by which I mean that the proportion of those over 60 or 65 has risen and is projected to continue to rise. Public and private pension arrangements involve huge financial flows because they are required to cover increasing sections of the population. The course of globalization itself has been shaped by institutional investors, many of them pension funds. At the present time systematic pension provision is largely confined to the richer countries but it is gradually dawning that pension arrangements are needed everywhere. The ageing of the population is rooted in a global, if uneven, decline in the birth rate as well
as an uneven, but also global, rise in life expectancy. In most developed countries the birth rate has fallen below the level at which it replenishes the existing population. Life expectancy in these countries is growing by about two years in every decade. China has gone through a similar demographic transition and it is spreading in most parts of the developing world. Trends like this cannot be extrapolated endlessly into the future but they have been established long enough to make very likely the overall growth of the proportion of the elderly in the total population.
