In article published this morning, the Wall Street Journal covered BETTER FINANCE’s concerns on the performance of pension savings’ returns in the EU. The 2015 edition of our research report “Pension Savings: The Real Return”, which now covers 15 EU countries and represents 85% of the EU population, shows that “savers in [most] European countries are getting a raw deal”.
The report encompasses up to 15 years of returns on pension savings (2000 to 2014) and takes into account the returns after inflation, fees and taxes. The findings clearly demonstrate that pension funds often underperformed their benchmarks: both equity funds and insurance products achieved very low average returns.
Recognising that “poor pension provision could become a burning issue”, we identified ten key policy measures that would go a long way towards improving the situation, such as harmonising disclosure requirements for all long term and retirement savings products, requiring ESAs to comply with their legal duty of analysing and reporting on saver trends as well as adopting taxation rules that incentivise long term retirement savings.
The full PDF version of the report can be downloaded here. Should you like to order a physical copy please contacts us at info(at)betterfinance.eu.