Characteristics of the South African retirement fund industry - Neryvia Pillay and Johannes Fedderke

However, the growth of the retirement fund industries in the UK, the US, Chile and Mexico appears to be greater than that of South Africa’s over the last decade. [...] The proportion of assets in DC schemes has also been increasing in the US over the same period, but the proportion of DC assets is higher in South Africa than in the US. [...] We use the log of administrative costs and number of members to reduce the impact of het- eroskedasticity and to enable the measurement of scale economies. [...] Including underwritten funds does not change the estimates of the cost elasticity much, and the estimates are slightly larger in two of the three cases. [...] In all the estimates, the scale coefficient β1 of the number of members is significantly different from the constant returns-to-scale value of 1.