ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the relation between public pension and other income sources in the incomes of retired people, and the interaction between these questions and household composition. It utilizes information collected for the recently published Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study of financial resources in retirement, which covered nine OECD member countries: the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden. Social transfers have been an important source of real income growth in most countries, but except in Canada and Japan the impact on income distribution has been either neutral or regressive. The chapter looks at a different, though related, issue: the risk of poverty experienced by vulnerable groups. It explores the crucial role in all countries of public transfers for those with low incomes, but the much greater variety for other income groups.
