TALLINN - Expenditures on pensions in Estonia by 2050 are estimated to decline by 2.5 percentage points compared with 2004, to 4.2 percent, a report by the European Commission stated.
The report, which projects the pension and health care spending of member states, sets Estonia apart as a country that has successfully carried out a pension reform, whose spending on residents' pensions is estimated to decline to 4.8 percent of GDP by 2030 and to 4.2 percent by 2050.
In 2004, Estonia spent 6.7 percent of its GDP on pensions.
The outlook is based on the assumption that the rules of the national pension systems will not change and there will be no extraordinary pension hikes. The ageing of Estonia's population has been taken into account.
Of the countries involved in the survey, the projected reduction in national expenditure on pensions was steeper only in Poland. The report predicts spending on pensions to increase significantly in countries that have not carried out a pension reform.
The analysis that took three years to complete is based on a population estimate by Euro-stat.
