L’impact et les implications sur l’équité intergénérationnelle des modifications apportées au Régime des rentes du Québec entre 1997 et 2018

Aging population and the raise of life expectancy are affecting different OECD countries including Canada. These demographic changes put intergenerational equity at the heart of several debates and preoccupations in the labour market as well as in public policies. Intergenerational equity has more than one meaning; as it can occur among living generations or between current and yet to be born generations. However, in both cases, the matter at hand is to make sure that the resources are to be distributed equally and fairly among all generations.  In Quebec, the last few years have been rich of discussion and policies about intergeneration equity particularly regarding pension’s plan. For instance, in 2018, the Government adopted a bill to modified and improved the Quebec Pension Plan (QPP) and they also adopted a bill to improve the Act Respecting Labour Standards. Regarding the latter, the changes were made to limit the use of two-tier retirement system in private pension offered by employers. Nonetheless, very few researches have been conducted to evaluate the current situation in terms of intergenerational equity in Quebec’s public policies. Several economic methods exist to evaluate public policies, but they mainly focus on budget solvability. Whereas generational accounting, develop by Auerbach, Gokhale and Kotlikoff (1994) focus on equity between the generations. In Canada, this type of exercise has already been done twice (see Mahboubi, 2019; Vaillancourt et Oreopoulos, 1998). Like any other methods, there are limits to generational accounting, one of them being the inability to compare living generation among one another. With that being said, Pertile, Polin, Rizza and Romanelli (2015) found a way to compare living generation and evaluate the impact of a change in a specific policy. Residual lifetime net tax rate allows them to compare two generations; using a year prior to the one used as a reference year and making sure that each generation has the same life expectancy.  In this master’s thesis, we will investigate the impact on intergeneration equity of the modification made between 1997 and 2018 in the QPP. QPP is an interesting redistribution mechanism to evaluate since all of Quebec’s workers pay contribution and thereafter, all receive a pension from this program. Residual lifetime net tax rate is expected to be impacted by the modification made to the contribution through out the years and the modifications that were just made to improve the earnings replacement rate.  The data used in this study are issued from provincial and federal government agencies. We found that the impact on intergenerational equity of the changes made in the QPP between 1998 and 2018 is modest. We also found that intragenerational equity has more impact on the residual lifetime net tax rate than intergenerational equity. Lastly, this study allowed us to identify potential researches avenues and solutions regarding intergenerational equity.

Keyphrases: Régime public retraite, Intergenerational Equity, Retirement, Public Pension Scheme