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Detroit Government Retirees Struggle to Keep Benefits
Don Taylor spent 26 years of his life as a police officer in Detroit, the city where he was born and raised. It was a dangerous job, but one he is fond of.
It also provided a dependable paycheck, as well as a guaranteed pension and health care coverage in retirement. Or so he thought. “There’s a dispute on the pensions, you know," he said.
“Borrowing a billion dollars to fund your pension, yes the pension is funded, but now it’s done through more debt," said Eric Scorsone of Michigan State University. He is on the team helping the city of Detroit emerge from its fiscal crisis.
“It’s probably as bad as any city has ever seen in terms of a fiscal crisis. My part is to work on tax and revenue forecasting and tax issues in general for the city as they work on a plan to move forward," he said.
The plan includes figuring out how to pay for retirement pensions funded with borrowed money, and how to pay for health care plans for current and retired public sector employees.
“The city really should be paying hundreds of millions of dollars more than it is right now, but there’s no money to do it, so the question is how do you fund that liability or do you reduce the liability by reducing benefits," said Scorsone.
Taylor says the pensions and health care plans of retirees are already modest.
“There are a lot of misconceptions too that in the city of Detroit, that the people’s benefits are “Cadillac” plans, and they’re overpaid, where the average pension is only $30,000," he said.
“I cannot believe that they could do any more cutting," said retired Detroit police officer Greg Trozak, who has two sons on the police force. While he is concerned about cuts to his own benefits, he is more worried about future benefits.
“I’m sure the active people are going to be hurting a lot more than a lot of us retirees are," he said.
“The elected officials in the city of Detroit should have seen this reduction in revenue coming, and should have seen that the population was declining years ago and should have adjusted for that, but they failed to do so. Now it’s resting on the backs of the employees and retirees," said Taylor.
The clock is ticking to turn Detroit’s finances around. Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr has less than eighteen months to make difficult decisions that would bring about the Motor City’s eventual solvency.
part 2Africa Sees Strong Economic Growth
The World Bank says while the global economic recovery remains slow, sub-Saharan African countries continue to grow at a strong pace. The bank has released its latest economic forecast for the region.
Four years after the start of the economic crisis, the World Bank describes the global recovery as “tepid,” especially in the euro zone. Sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, has some of the fastest growing economies in the world, thanks to domestic demand and commodity prices that remain high. That’s according to the latest edition of the World Bank report called Africa’s Pulse.
“The report finds that Africa has been growing at a sustained, robust pace in 2012 and the region grew by 4.7 percent, which is double the rate of growth of the global economy. And this growth is impressive because it is in spite of the tepid and weak recovery that the global economy was experiencing in 2012,” said Punam Chuhan-Pole, lead economist for the Africa region, who is the co-author.
She said that if you exclude South Africa, which was hit by the recession, the sub-Saharan economy actually grew by 5.8 percent. Some individual countries had an even higher growth rate.
Several countries, such as Ethiopia, Rwanda, Ghana have managed to grow at 7 percent or more in each of the past three years. That means 2010, ’11 and ’12. And several other countries have also been growing at a strong pace, for example, Nigeria, Zambia, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Despite the slow global recovery, Foreign Direct Investment, or FDI, actually increased in sub-Saharan Africa by 5.5 percent to $37.7 billion in 2012. In fact, it continued to grow in Africa while falling elsewhere in the developing world.
Chuhan-Pole also said domestic spending rose, as did government spending in infrastructure.
“So with government capital spending increasing to meet some of the large gaps in power and transportation, energy, Africa’s investment has been rising. Also, private consumption has been supported by declining inflation as well as lower interest rates and also easier access to credit. In addition, agricultural income in several countries increased. So all of this has helped to keep private consumption rising,” she said.
The World Bank forecast said that sub-Saharan Africa’s economic growth is expected to average over 5 percent between 2013 and 2015. However, there are risks, such as the weak global recovery.
Chuhan-Pole also said growth has been good for poverty reduction, just not good enough.
“What to we mean by that? If you look the period since 1996, per capita GDP has improved at a fairly brisk pace of 2.4 percent per annum. However, there’s variation across countries. We find that resource rich countries grew at over twice the rate as resource poor countries,” she said.
The World Bank’s outgoing Chief Economist for Africa, Shanta Devarajan, says harnessing economic growth to accelerate poverty reduction is the biggest issue facing policymakers. That’s especially true, he says, with more countries discovering they’re rich in resources. Almost 50 percent of the region’s population lives on $1.25 a day.
“What we have to realize is that resource income or resource revenues are not necessarily the fastest way to reduce poverty for the very simple reason that growth in resource rich countries occurs in the extractive sector, but the poor earn their income from agriculture. Seventy percent of the poor are actually working in agriculture,” he said.
He said there are several ways to ensure resource wealth benefits the population and not just the oil, gas or mineral companies. First, he says, contracts must be as transparent as possible, so countries get their fair share. The next step is to spend that money wisely, for example, on infrastructure, like electricity, along with health and education. He says safety nets and cash transfers should be available to shield the population from poverty and global economic shocks.
Devarajan said that agriculture is another good place to invest.
‘There’s an estimate that worldwide, something like, one percent growth in agriculture is four times as powerful in reducing poverty as non-agricultural growth.”
He said Africa has the potential to be – what he calls – the workbench of the world, as well as the source of savings, investment and growth. Much of that has to do with the continent’s demographics, which are bucking the world trend.
“Africa is going to be the youngest continent in the world. We have a youth bulge and the number of 15 to 65 year olds is going to be the highest in Africa in about 20 years. And that means that we have an opportunity because the number of working people relative to the number of dependents, if you like, very young and very old, is going to be increasing in Africa, whereas in the rest of the world, frankly, it’s going to be decreasing,” he said.
The World Bank’s Africa’s Pulse report also said good progress has been made on a few of the Millennium Development Goals. But the progress across the region has been uneven and, overall, the region lags in achieving development goals.
