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To promote transparency and provide information, the Federal Planning Bureau regularly publishes the methods and results of its works. The publications are organised in different series, such as Outlooks, Working Papers and Planning Papers. Some reports can be consulted here, along with the Short Term Update newsletters that were published until 2015. You can search our publications by theme, publication type, author and year.
The Ageing Working Group (AWG) was established in December 1999 by the Economic Policy Committee of the European Council ECOFIN. This working group is responsible for producing common budgetary projections on age-related public expenditure items. Each Member State calculates its longterm pension expenditure based on common assumptions discussed in the AWG.
The demographic and macroeconomic assumptions in the public pension expenditure projection of Belgium for the AWG are different from those retained in the national projection of the Study Committee on Ageing, as well as the scope of pension definition. This projection is carried out using the MALTESE model of the Federal Planning Bureau.
This report presents the new Belgian pension projection 2016-2070 that will be published in the “2018 Ageing Report” next year. In addition, these results will be used in the context of the “Fiscal Sustainability Report” of the European Commission that assesses the mid-term and long-term fiscal situation of Member states.
Other publications - REP_COUNTRYFICH2017 (en),
The supplementary table 29, “Accrued-to-date pension entitlements in social insurance” of the Eurostat transmission program covers the statutory pensions and occupational pension schemes in social insurance in Belgium. In a working paper that was published May 2017, the Federal Planning Bureau presented a first methodology to complete the columns on the statutory pension schemes. Following this publication and the preliminary data transmission towards Eurostat mid-2017, the decision was taken to change the model and implement the PBO-methodology. Moreover, the first model contained an error in the programming part which lead to an overestimation of the accrued rights. This error has been corrected for. Consequently, the accrued-to-date pension entitlements are lower than the ones presented in the working paper.
Reports - REP_11311 (en),
The Commission for Pension Reform 2020-2040 proposed an adjusted pension system which calculates pensions based on collected points. An important aspect of that system implied that past wages should be adjusted on the basis of the average wage increase. This Working Paper investigates who will be the winners and the losers when this adjustment mechanism is introduced by means of a points system in the salaried workers' scheme, and why. We show that people with low pensions, low-skilled workers, tenants and women nowadays have certain career features which make sure that they gain more often from such an operation than people with high pensions, highly skilled workers, owners and men. This also underlines the importance of minimum schemes in the impact of such a reform.
Working Papers - Working Paper 09-17 (nl),
This paper proposes a new model to account for unobserved heterogeneity in empirical modelling. The model extends the well-known Finite Mixture (or Latent Class) Model by using the Johnson family of distributions for the component densities. Due to the great variety of distributional shapes that can be assumed by the Johnson family, the method does not impose the usual a priori assumptions regarding the type of densities that are mixed.
Working Papers - Working Paper 14-17 (en),
Other publications - FORVERG201701 (fr), (mix), (nl),
Forecasts & Outlook - Economic outlook 2017-2022 (fr), (mix), (nl),
Supplementary table 29, "Accrued-to-date pension entitlements in social insurance" for Belgium will be published for the first time in 2017. This table covers the pension schemes in social insurance: statutory pensions and occupational pensions, whether they are funded or not. Table 29 shows the pensions entitlements on an accrued-to-date basis. These are present values of the pension entitlements of the retired population and the part of pension entitlements that is already accrued by the future beneficiaries. As such, accrued-to-date liabilities do not represent public debt and are not an indicator of the fiscal or financial sustainability of the pension systems and are only appropriate for national accounts purposes. Accrued-to-date liabilities should only be interpreted as an asset from the households in national accounts’ terminology. An assessment of the sustainability of the pension systems can be found in the reports of the Ageing Working Group or the Belgian Study Commission for Ageing.
Working Papers - Working Paper 06-17 (en),
Working Papers - Working Paper 03-17 (nl),
Reports - REP_CEP8_11421 (mix),
Forecasts & Outlook - EFPOP1660 (fr), (nl),
This Working Paper presents, on the basis of information available until July 2016, a projection at unchanged policy until 2030 of the population at risk of poverty or social exclusion in Belgium, as defined in the framework of the Europe 2020 Strategy. This population should amount to 2.232 million people in 2018, or 418 000 more than the Europe 2020 target. By 2030, its share should shrink to 16.1%, still 5.6 percentage points higher than the goal resulting from the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Working Papers - Working Paper 12-16 (en), (fr), (nl),
This Working Paper presents the projection methodology for internal migration, which is integrated from 2016 in the population projections published by the Federal Planning Bureau and Statistics Belgium. The methodology is based on migration intensity between districts, rather than on emigration rates from one district to another. With migration intensity, not only is the population of the departure district taken into account (population at risk of moving) but also the population of the destination district (as a proxy for attractiveness). The short-term evolution of migration intensity is in line with the most recent trends observed in a series of preferential migration flows between districts. In the long term, migration intensity is assumed to be constant.
Working Papers - Working Paper 10-16 (en),
Other publications - FORVERG201601 (fr), (mix), (nl),
Social protection for the costs of long‐term care (LTC) varies widely between countries, and to date there has been no systematic comparison of the experiences of people with LTC needs in different countries. In response to this information gap, the OECD and the European Commission (EC) have established a project to make quantitative comparisons of social protection for LTC in OECD and EU countries, using the typical cases approach. Social protection encompasses both cash benefits, conditional on long‐term care needs, and long‐term care services offered at no or subsidized cost to the user. A data collection questionnaire has been distributed. This report describes how the data for Belgium have been collected. The following schemes are taken into account: the allowance for the assistance of the elderly; the allowances for incontinence and for the chronically ill; the Flemish care insurance; the sickness and invalidity insurance for home nursing care and care in institutions; home care (not nursing care), regulated and subsidized by regional governments; and service vouchers. The data refer to the year 2015.
Reports - REP_PROTSEC_16 (en),
Reports - REP_CEP4_11186 (mix),
This rapport was drafted at request by the Strategic Cell of the Ministry of Pensions. The first part discusses the regulatory framework concerned with regularisation of higher education years in each pension scheme. The second part describes the importance of regularised periods of study in the different pension schemes. The data used in the second part were provided by the pension institutions (Federale Pensioendienst, RSVZ).
Reports - RAPPORT_CEP6_11222 (mix),
Reports - REP_CEP2_11081 (mix),
At the request of the steering committee of the Pension knowledge centre, an overview is provided of how strenuous work is taken into account in the pension legislation of some EU countries. There is no uniform approach to the concept of strenuous work in the different countries under investigation. Two major trends can be identified: a list of strenuous occupations in the older legislations and a list of objective criteria in the most recent legislations. In some cases, these criteria include also criteria of mental strain. With a few exceptions, all systems examined only apply to private sector workers.
Reports - OPREP201603 (mix),
The Federal Planning Bureau and Statistics Belgium have updated their demographic projections. Belgium’s population should grow by about 85,000 inhabitants both in 2016 and 2017. Half of this growth is due to the additional flow of refugees. However important, this population increase is not exceptional; such increases have already been recorded in recent years, for example between 2007 and 2011. Over the long term, the average population growth should reach 40,000 inhabitants a year between 2020 and 2060 (against 50,000 inhabitants over the 1991-2014 period).
Forecasts & Outlook - EFPOP1560 (fr), (nl),
Reports - OPREP201605 (mix), (mix),
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.
Other publications - REP_COUNTRYFICH2015 (en),
Reports - REP_CEP_03 (mix),
Other publications - REP_CEP_01 (mix),
This report presents the results of an impact assessment of an increase in the social integration allowance (assistance scheme). The study which was commissioned by the State Secretary responsible for poverty reduction consists of two parts, on the one hand, an assessment of the macroeconomic and budgetary effects, including the possible return effects, of the increase and, on the other hand, an estimate of its impact on the poverty risk.
Reports - OPREP201512 (mix), (mix),
Other publications - FORVERG201501 (fr), (nl),
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