ABSTRACT
This chapter presents various sustainability indicators of old-age security systems and investigates their significance. The term sustainability was originally coined in forestry. Sustainability was thus defined mainly as the even spread of development potentials and life chances among the generations. With the sustainability gap, generation accounting provides an indicator of financial sustainability of the overall public budget. An initial idea of the sustainability of statutory pension insurance is provided by the projected rise in contribution rates, assuming that current law continues unamended. Assessing the sustainability of public pensions presupposes an appropriate definition of the term sustainability. Formally more sophisticated sustainability indicators are afforded by, specifically, generation accounting. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for instance, simply extrapolates public revenue and not the age-specific expenditure proportionate to GDP. The sustainability of subsystems such as the statutory pension insurance therefore can hardly be identified as an isolated variable.
