Expensive electricity, an inadequately funded public sector pension system, and high interest rates round out this negative picture.
Reforming the Czechs' pension system and their health service will be necessary but unpopular.
One sensible reform would be for the central government to take charge of the pension system.
Meanwhile no one is even thinking about reforms to the country's creaking pension system.
It is a great disappointment that so many workers remain outside the pension system altogether.
In Japan, a third of self-employed people no longer contribute to the basic pension system.
Unless it goes up, any comprehensive pension system that China might eventually introduce will be hideously expensive.
Instead of having a pension system that's a fiscal drain, we would have one that's a capital creator.
He shared his thoughts on how to fix the flawed public pension system in the U.S with me.
Mr Ozawa promises to restore the pension system, help the working poor and the old, and revitalise the countryside.
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It is also considering ways to fundamentally reform its social security pension system, perhaps privatizing a portion of it.
He and his colleagues considered the pension system in the round, taking into account both state and private provision.
Activist institutional shareholders are still rare in Germany, not least because the country lacks a properly funded pension system.
Its board is weighing property tax increases as well as a new hybrid pension system that would be partly market-based.
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Letting charter schools exit the pension system leaves a smaller pool of public school systems to cover existing funding gaps.
To fix the pension system in the United States, according to Reynolds, a combination of changes need to be made.
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The result is that the federal government bails out the national pension system to the tune of 1.5% of GDP.
The Greek pension system is so broken that it cannot afford to buy new bonds to bail out the Greek government.
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Without these future workers our already tottering pension system will become even more untenable, as is occurring in Europe and Japan.
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The priorities now, says Mr Lagos, are reforming health services, broadening access to higher education and improving Chile's privatised pension system.
Reforms may be hammered out in education and immigration and (at a stretch) the environment and the Social Security pension system.
He has all but ruled out raising the retirement age or cutting pensions to plug the gap in America's public pension system.
Raising salaries or making legislators full-time isn't politically popular, so lawmakers instead arrange the pension system to provide greater benefits in retirement.
GDP, breaking the link between the minimum wage and pensions, and reforming the pension system, Brazil's version of welfare for the rich.
"Not only should you be hiring more bodies for safety, you are impacting the pension system by these astronomical salaries, " he said.
Her main effort will be to overhaul Chile's much-hyped private pension system.
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The UK's statistical authority also emphasised that the UK's pension system was far less generous than that of many other economically developed countries.
It will enable Allianz to exploit more fully the sweeping reforms just now beginning to be felt in Germany's imploding state pension system.
Mr Tremonti recently described Italy's pension system as first-rate and said that no further changes would be considered until the crisis is over.
There are more hard choices for the government this weekend, as it meets in conclave to discuss reform of Germany's over-stretched pension system.
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