Reducing poverty in retirement: - The pension systems of Australia, Sweden and Norway

8OECD (2024) Public and private social expenditure: Old age; OECD (2024) Annual GDP and components – output approach; Treasury (2024) Tax expenditure and insights statement 2024, p 121-125 Reducing poverty in retirement: The pension systems of Australia, Sweden and Norway 4 % of GDP How retirement is funded in Sweden, Norway, and Australia In Sweden and Norway, a large public pension program is co. [...] The opposite is true of Australia, where a private superannuation system is supplemented by the public Age Pension program.9 SAVING FOR RETIREMENT IN SWEDEN AND NORWAY Sweden’s National Public Pension, and Norway’s Old-age Pension function in very similar ways, and both are part of broader national social insurance schemes.10 Funding comes partly from the national government, but employees and emp. [...] In 2020–21, 54% of the benefit of concessional taxation of superannuation contributions and 57% of the benefit of concessional taxation of superannuation earnings went to the top 20% of income earners.24 This policy is meant to encourage people to save more for retirement, but in reality it helps high income earners become richer. [...] In fact, the concessions provided to high-income earners are so great that Treasury has estimated that they “receive more lifetime government support in dollar terms than lower- and middle-income earners”.25 The amount of foregone revenue that goes to superannuation concessions is so large that it is nearly equivalent to the cost of the Age Pension.26 Treasury forecasts that combined tax concessio. [...] 30 ATO (2024) Tax Stats 2021-22 Table 22 31 Because assistance to the aged is mostly made of the Age Pension and because the Government does not release separate figures just for the Age Pension, when this paper refers to the cost of the Age Pension it is referring to support for seniors; Australia Government (2022) Budget Strategy and Outlook: Budget Paper No.