Barriers to pension scheme participation in small and medium sized enterprises

Alistair Byrne, Debbie Harrison and David Blake

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Large sections of the UK population are failing to make adequate provision for their retirement, and one area where provision is notably poor is amongst people working for small and medium sized businesses. We use information gathered from interviews with individuals from a wide range of organisations active in the pensions market for these companies to shed light on the particular barriers to pension scheme participation in this sector in which over 40% of the working population is employed. We find that many finance directors are sceptical of the benefits of providing pensions for their employees and deliberately structure their pension schemes to avoid high participation rates. We also find that financial advisers and pension providers are reluctant to promote pensions in companies where they perceive the management to be unsupportive and where there is no clear profit margin. We suggest one way in which management could be motivated to encourage pension scheme participation amongst their employees.

Keywords: pensions; small and medium sized enterprises; participation rates; independent financial advisers; employee benefit consultants (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 10 pages
Date: 2004-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/24820/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:24820

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().