Sustainability of funded pension schemes: A financial position perspective using options

Digitalization and technological advancement, referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0), results not only in technological innovation but also in the changes in society and public awareness. One such tendency is the demographic aging, which implicates two concerns: the instability of the public pension systems and the social awareness related with the risk of major reduction of benefits in contrast to the expectations and the need for the additional private pension security. The research has aimed to identify the opinions and attitudes of the students from Poland and Ukraine in respect to the broadly understood issues of the old age security, as well as to recognize the prospective differences in this field between the researched populations. The relevant research was conducted using the PAPI method in the years 2018–2019. Within the framework of the research, nine specific hypotheses were presented concerning the attitudes towards the selected aspects of the pension schemes and old-age security. The results were compiled in the form of the semantic differential, and the Mann-Whitney U test was utilized to verify the significance of the differences in the distribution of the answers given by the students. Those served as the basis for formulating the conclusions regarding similarities and differences in the opinions expressed by young people studied populations.

Acknowledgment
This project has been financed by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education within the “Regional Initiative of Excellence” Programme for 2019–2022. Project No. 021/RID/2018/19. Total project budget: PLN 11 897 131,40.

Using funded and unfunded pillars, the optimal pension structure is estimated using an over-lapping generation model, calibrated to the average OECD countries. While simulating different pillar sizes, a socio-economic characteristic was revealed in which low-earning groups are prone to unexpected market risks than high-earning cohorts and support a larger contribution than better-off individuals. This led to high contribution rates for funded pillars and low contributions rates for social security pillars. This suboptimal allocation leads to inefficient hedging capability for the pension portfolio. An alternative is a minimum pension guarantee as an efficient system stabilizer as it rebalances the economic cost among different earning cohorts. However, the guarantee might be expensive to implement if not capitalized early in the working phases in an era of aging populations, low birth rates, and deep financial crisis.

Social insurance has been a pivotal tool in implementing social security. The purpose of the study is to analyze the existing information clusters (areas) in the field of social insurance. Clusters define related and unrelated groups in the field of social insurance. These groups will help streamline and identify areas where little or no research has been conducted to present. To achieve the objective, the study employed a precise and systematic procedure to gather 562 journal articles published in Scopus-indexed journals from 1926–2022. Subsequently, VOSviewer, Science of Science (Sci2), and Gephi were utilized to conduct bibliometric analysis (such as keyword co-occurrence and bibliographic coupling) and network analysis tests (such as citation and co-citation analysis). The results of keyword co-occurrence and co-citation analysis suggest there are three knowledge clusters: welfare provisions, benefits provided by social insurance, and social insurance operational aspects. Through analysis found top article-based Inequality, social insurance, and redistribution with 408(LC) and 1042(GC) and its page rank value is 0.010574 through prestigious analysis. Additionally, it is also observed that I. Nielsen had made the most substantial contributions as an author, with R. Smyth and C. Nyland following closely in the rankings. Also, observed maximum total link strength with 109 value on social security variable. The study also drawn attention to specific deficiencies, including regional concentration of research, insufficient research in developing and underdeveloped countries, inadequate knowledge sharing among researchers, limited methodological diversity, and a lack of research on the role of social insurance in facilitating society’s recovery from the pandemic.