Pensions - public sector vs private sector

On the day of the biggest public sector strikes for many years, and the day after George Osborne’s statement of the depressing prospects for the economy, those students with extra time on their hands might be interested to read this article which compares public and private sector pensions.

There is probably no dispute over the need to avoid ‘pensioner poverty’ as our life expectancy grows towards 100, and so the article makes no reference to the fact that most pensioners will be able to receive payouts for much longer than was envisaged when they first started working, because that effect is equal in both sectors. It also doesn’t explicitly cover the effect of guaranteed index-linking of payouts, which is just one of many factors which makes the comparison between the two sectors so difficult. What do students think they would do if they were in government?