A substantial literature highlights how reliance on private sector sources for later life finances systematically disadvantages women. Critics of the neo-liberal policy turn argue that this is because public responsibilities have increasingly been privatized. We critically assess this claim in respect of pensions using a comparative analytic approach to document retirement income systems in the US, UK and Singapore, three liberal countries often regarded as among the vanguard for private arrangements for income. Our conclusions are derived from critical analysis of national policies and secondary analysis of official statistics. We find that, contrary to prevailing assumptions, Singapore (often referred to as the world’s most marketized country) has multiple inbuilt state protections that minimize both risks and gender gaps in later life provision for citizens, and has many of the characteristics of protective state systems. However, in Singapore, the most disadvantaged workers, often migrant women, are neither included in national accounts nor considered as potential recipients of income in later life, thus heavily skewing the results. Such low-paid workers are included in data for the other two countries. The US seems to occupy the middle ground among the three countries. Both US and UK rely heavily on a mixed economy of retirement income; however, the greater state support for public pensions in the US Social Security system leads to categorizing the UK as the country where older women, and older people in general, seem most at risk of poor outcomes in old age.
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