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.

Negative trends in the social sphere and the social problems that exist because of this lead to a sharpening of state national security issues. At the same time, domestic and foreign scholars do not pay sufficient attention to the psychological component of social security, which characterizes the subjective assessment of the state of the social sphere development by the population. This very aspect of social security has become a basis for the formulation of the research goal as an analysis of the state of social security of Ukraine in a regional context in accordance with the system of indicators taking into account the psychological component. The main methods of the investigation are analysis, synthesis, comparative analysis, cluster analysis method. The practical result is the definition of the main components of national security, special attention is paid to the analysis of the interpretation of the definition of “social security” by domestic scientists. The expediency of allocating the psychological component of social security has been substantiated. The list of social security indicators has defined in accordance with the methodological recommendations for calculating the level of economic security of Ukraine, namely: the ratio of nominal wages to the subsistence minimum per working age person; the ratio of the size of the labor pension to the subsistence minimum of the disabled persons; the number of HIV-infected persons with the first diagnosis, persons per 100 thousand people); the number of patients with active tuberculosis with the first diagnosis, persons per 100 thousand people; level of crime. The so-called indexes of social tension have been added to this list, which take into account the psychological aspect of the population of the state, namely: arrears of wages; the level of payment by the population of housing and communal services; the level of registered unemployment; the number of employees who were in forced full-time employment. A cluster analysis of the regions of Ukraine has carried out on the basis of the listed social security indicators, which resulted in the definition of regions with high indicators of social security, namely: Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv, Luhansk, Odesa and Kharkiv regions.