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Abstract: One of the most significant social changes in the countries of the European Union is the rapid ageing of their populations and its current and excpectable effects on their balances of economies. Hungarian population, similarly to those of other European countries is also rapidly ageing, making it inevitable to face different challenges in the near future. The most important of these are the reforming of the healthcare system, social insurance, pension system and taxing system. The realization of these reforms require longterm strategies on the part of the state - the strategies should be modelled, tested and controlled. In some countries of the European Union the methodology of microsimulation has been used for a long while in order to check different impacts of different regulations, and it is getting popular in Hungary as well. This study consists of three parts. The first part is presenting the present and excpectable changes of the population of the European Union as a whole. The second part presents the results of pension modelling of the countries of the EU. The third part is describing a possible setting up of a 4 year-long research project examining the economical effects of globally ageing population on pension security.
Keywords: microsimulation, modelling of the pension system, research project
1 Changing of the populations of the European Union and Hungary
At present most countries' social insurance systems are pay-as-you-go (PAYG) systems, i.e. expenses of pesions being payed are covered by the inpayment of jobholders. [2]. The theoretical foundation of this kind of pension system was introduced in a publication of Paul Samuelson in 1958. This theoretical foundation is based on the presumption that the active members of the society support the elderly. This presumption is valid regarding the maintainability of the system only if the number of babies being born is sufficient to insure enough active future jobholders to be able to support the preceding generation(s). Another presumption of Samuelson is that by the constant growth of population economic development also takes place [13]. We can examine the distribution of population regarding age by a population pyramid. As the first figure shows- calculations of the website called Population Pyramids- the population of Europe is going to decrease. The figure is representing the...