Examination of possible progress of Japanese pension system using an agent-based model

The objective of this paper is to carry out computational experiments to examine Japanese public pension system from the perspective of both macro-level and micro-level. In Japan, one of the most aging countries in the world, many studies have been conducted to evaluate the sustainability of the pension system under the condition of drastic demographic change through computational simulations. Most of those studies including a governmental valuation of the pension system mainly focus on the macro-level outputs of the simulation, however, pay little attention to individuals covered in pension system. In order to obtain the micro data of individual, we develop an agent-based model for Japanese public pension system, using actual statistical data sets adopted from surveys by Japanese government. In this paper, we present the development of our simulation model, and discuss the effectiveness of an agent-based approach to examine pension scheme through our simulation results.