Japan faced with prospect of 'pensioner poverty', says OECD

Tokyo

JAPAN entered 2016 "another year older" and if not quite "deeper in debt" then still with the highest public debt to gross domestic product ratio among advanced economies. For a country with a fast-greying population, this combination of ageing and high debt is toxic for public pensions.

What Mark Pearson, a deputy director in the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), calls the danger of "pensioner poverty" is growing in Japan as life expectancy continues to increase while population ageing puts strains on government finances.