IT MAY not be as certain as death and taxes, but, in the rich world, living to a ripe old age is an increasingly safe bet. Unfortunately, financing the long, leisurely retirement to which people aspire is a riskier proposition. Individuals worry that they have not saved enough, or that investments will go wrong. Or, perhaps worse, they give it too little thought. Governments struggle to muster the political support needed to keep pensions and healthcare for the elderly from ripping gaping holes in future budgets. And corporate pensions, once viewed as guaranteeing a prosperous and anxiety-free retirement, are starting to look risky too.

In order to help regulators ensure that workers who belong to occupational defined-benefit plans get the pensions they have been promised, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has released, on Thursday May 10th, its guidelines for regulation of private pensions. Its recommendations are so sound and uncontroversial that they are nearly useless.

Few would disagree that pensions should contain enough assets to cover the benefits they have promised. Or that funds should get there by using expected lifespans and wages of current workers to calculate whether invested contributions will be enough to cover them. The devil is in the details: deciding what real rate of return is reasonable to expect from pension-plan assets; calculating how long people will work and how much their final salary will be; assessing how much overfunding should be expected from firms during stockmarket booms.

These problems have received particular attention in America, where the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), which insures corporate defined-benefit schemes, seems perpetually in danger of insolvency. Although its reported deficit has eased thanks to improving markets and legislative reform, the difference between assets and expected liabilities is near $19 billion. This deficit is unsurprising. According to the report, companies insured with the PBGC have a collective unfunded liability of $340 billion. While this is slightly less than in 2005, America’s corporate schemes are still far from solvency.

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