身边的经济学·社会常识英语精读30篇（3）
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Pension System Design Under Demographic Stress: Intergenerational Equity vs. Financial Sustainability
人口压力下的养老金制度设计：代际公平与财务可持续性的权衡
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Aging populations transform pension systems from intergenerational solidarity mechanisms into contested fiscal liabilities with explicit distributional consequences.
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Pay-as-you-go schemes face mounting pressure as dependency ratios rise and labor force participation plateaus or declines.
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Reforms like gradual retirement age increases improve sustainability but risk exacerbating inequality among low-income, physically demanding occupations.
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Notional defined contribution systems attempt to reconcile fairness and solvency by linking benefits to lifetime contributions and longevity adjustments.
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However, their success depends on accurate demographic forecasting and politically feasible indexation formulas during prolonged low-growth periods.
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Funding shortfalls rarely stem from demographic inevitability alone but from decades of underfunded promises and weak governance oversight.
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Some countries introduce automatic adjustment mechanisms—triggered by life expectancy or funding ratios—to depoliticize periodic recalibrations.
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Yet these mechanisms require public understanding and trust to avoid perceptions of stealth benefit erosion or regressive burden shifting.
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Intergenerational equity demands transparent accounting of implicit debt and honest discussion about who bears adjustment costs—workers, retirees, or future taxpayers.
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Private pension supplementation helps only where coverage, portability, and fiduciary standards prevent further stratification.
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System resilience hinges less on abstract actuarial balance than on adaptive institutions capable of renegotiating social contracts amid uncertainty.
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Therefore, pension reform is fundamentally about sustaining legitimacy—not just solvency—in societies undergoing profound demographic transition.