Economic Policy Committee’s Ageing Working Group - Belgium: Country Fiche 2015 [ REP_COUNTRYFICH2015 - 27/11/2015]

The 2015 Ageing Report includes pension projections made in autumn 2014. For Belgium these did not take into account the new pension reform announced in the Government Agreement of October 2014. By the end of July 2015, all the different components of the reform had been legislated. This Belgian updated projection of November 2015 takes into account this pension reform.

In comparison with the 2015 Ageing Report projection, the revision of the pension cost of ageing is mainly due to the pension reform. Other new measures are also included, mainly the present indexation freeze (implying a 2% decrease of pensions in real terms) and a reduction of public employment (implying some redistribution of future pensioners across the different pension schemes). These updated projections are based on an updated database (more recent version of national accounts data in ESA 2010). In addition, some refinements of the pension models were required in order to simulate the pension reform.