Helping South Africans achieve a better income in retirement: a critical evaluation of the impact of treasury proposals
Journal of Economic and Financial Sciences
| Field | Value | |
| Title | Helping South Africans achieve a better income in retirement: a critical evaluation of the impact of treasury proposals | |
| Creator | De Beer, Jesse A. | |
| Description | Retirement income security is an issue relevant to the majority of South Africans, many of whom are financially inexperienced and illiterate. South Africa has a sophisticated retirement industry offering a very wide range of choice of annuity products, but these are often not designed to optimise choices by rather unsophisticated investors. This article provides an overview of issues in the South African income withdrawal market, as well as policy remedies proposed by National Treasury to deal with these issues. The aim of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of these policy proposals, using a behaviourally informed framework to financial regulation (Barr, Mullainathan Shafir, 2008). It recognises that policy remedies need to take into account the realities of how people make retirement income decisions, and how the institutional environment impacts on this. The results of the research suggest that the main policy proposal – simplifying the retirement income withdrawal landscape through the use of default options – is only a partial solution to the problem of unsophisticated consumers who must make several challenging decisions. The research contributes to the literature by providing a more complete, integrated view of the factors that shape retirement income withdrawal decisions and offers practitioners several insights into appropriate reform of the retirement income market. | |
| Publisher | AOSIS | |
| Date | 2015-04-30 | |
| Identifier | 10.4102/jef.v8i1.90 | |
| Source | Journal of Economic and Financial Sciences; Vol 8, No 1 (2015); 185-202 2312-2803 1995-7076 | |
| Language | eng | |
| Relation |
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:
https://jefjournal.org.za/index.php/jef/article/view/90/86
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