In the United States, fewer than half of all workers participate in an
employer-sponsored retirement plan. In Australia, about 90% of the
workforce has a formal retirement account. The most important difference
between the two systems, as Bloomberg Business Week’s Nick Summers explains in a recent piece,
is that in Australia, contributing to your account is mandatory—and
most workers now put in a minimum of 9% of each paycheck. The result: A
little more than 20 years after it was enacted, Australia’s
Superannuation Guarantee program now has $1.52 trillion in assets, a
little over half as much as the $2.8 trillion parked in American
401(k)s—in a country whose population is only one-fourteenth the size of
ours.
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