Chancen und Risiken der Riester-Rente

Demographic change confronts the German Pay-As-You-Go pension system with serious problems. For this reason, reductions in the level of public pensions were adopted under the pension reform in 2001, which also strengthened significantly the funded second and third pillars of old-age provision. The introduction of the supplementary pension provision brings with itself two major risks we are going to analyse in the present paper. One risk is implied by the voluntariness of supplementary arrangements. There is uncertainty over whether households � in particular the less affluent ones � will show the willingness and/or the capability to accumulate supplementary savings for their old age consistently. A further risk for supplementary old-age provision - which could as well be seen as a chance � rests in the return on contributions. Critics of funded private retirement provision often point at the return risk, in particular against the backdrop of the recent developments on capital markets. This paper asks whether under these risks, households will be able to close the gap arising from a reduction of public pension levels and to which degree there is scope for temporary suspensions of contributions to supplementary schemes.