Benchmarking Policy Inputs and Social Outputs of Retirement Payment Schemes: China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan Compared With the Three Worlds

Issues to do with the availability and quality of statistics for carrying out comparative studies on China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan have been debated for decades. Applying some of the findings of individual studies may be a way to bypass the problems of statistics and develop a policy index system comprising of policy input and social output indicators, in order to thoroughly scrutinise and evaluate the performance of the retirement payment provisions of these four Asian states on the basis of the Surface Measure of Overall Performance (SMOP) approach, which has already produced fruitful results elsewhere. This paper attempts to apply such a policy index system to compare the retirement provisions in the East and West. Germany, Sweden, the UK and the USA are selected to examine the validity and reliability of the index on the one hand, and to establish the typology of pension provisions on the other. As the results illustrate, four to six types of retirement payment provisions can be discerned with regard to the different levels of performance achieved.