The course of globalization itself has been shaped by institutional investors, many of them pension funds. China has gone through a similar demographic transition and it is spreading in most parts of the developing world. Trends like this cannot be extrapolated endlessly into the future but they have been established long enough to make very likely the overall growth of the proportion of the elderly in the total population. The ageing process is more advanced in the richer countries of Western Europe, Japan, and North America and this is matched by much stronger pension provision. Switzerland in the 1980s, was based on mandatory membership of an occupational scheme operated by one of the country’s insurance houses. The Swiss version of compulsory contributions was not so appealing to privatizers for two reasons – because it did not replace the state pension and because it offered savers a guaranteed minimum annual rate of return of 4 per cent.