Respondents are interviewed using an online panel survey, and the interviews are conducted in their local languages in January/February of each year.
The interviews cover a wide range of issues such as attitudes toward retirement planning, the roles of government and employers in providing retirement benefits, and the impact of the financial crisis on attitudes regarding investment risk and retirement planning.
Selected Countries
The survey includes a broad mix of industrial and industrializing countries. Many of these countries are working to build pension assets from a low base. For example, in China, pension fund assets, in 2012, represented just 0.9% of GDP compared with 160% in the Netherlands. The 15 countries in the 2016 study accounted for over 86% of the world's funded pension assets.
In 2016 the survey covered employees and retirees in 15 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries were selected on the basis of their distinctive pension systems, as well as their varying demographic and aging trends.
Respondents
In 2016, 14,400 respondents were pre-retirees and 1,600 were already retired. The survey did not include the unemployed, long-term disabled or the self-employed, as each of these groups faces specific challenges in planning for retirement. Instead, the objective for this survey is to provide a broader perspective based on the mainstream working population.
