Jeremy Warner (Extracted from "The cost of public sector pensions is twice the national debt. Is that a crisis or isn't it?", The Independent, 15 November 2005)

"According to new research undertaken for the IEA by Neil Record, a former Bank of England economist and now chairman of Record Asset Management, the total size of the public sector's unfunded pensions liability is now a jaw dropping £817bn, amounting to nearly 70 per cent of GDP, or nearly twice as much as the Government's own estimate of the costs . . . . about £30,000 per household . . . ."

[Ed: One of the reasons why China's economic growth rate is relatively slow -- a mere 9 or 10%.p.a. at the present time -- is that the ordinary worker in privately-owned industry in the coastal provinces is saving about 40% of his wage for his old age instead of spending his surplus on consumer goods as they do in the West (and then some!). However, in 20 years' time, when the new wave of post-Deng Xiaoping's Chinese workers starts to retire, many old people in the "welfare" states of the West will be sleeping on the pavement. As Jeremy Warner says later in the above article, don't hold your breath that the UK (and our crisis is far smaller than most of Western Europe) will solve the problem. Blair repeatedly delays reforms because he knows that New Labour wouldn't be voted in next time if he were do so.]