"If the pension system for one-fifth of humanity is left the way it is now, China's savings rate could fall to about 20% of GDP in 20 years' time from 40% today -- and so cut the country's, and the world's, economic growth rate dramatically."

Hugo Restall, editorial page editor, The Asian Wall Street Journal, 2001.

"The costs of global aging will be far beyond the means of even the world's wealthiest nations—unless retirement benefit systems are radically reformed. Failure to do so, to prepare early and boldly enough, will spark economic crises that will dwarf the recent meltdowns in Asia and Russia. For this and other reasons, global aging will become not just the transcendent economic issue of the 21st century, but the transcendent political issue as well."

Pete Peterson, former U.S. secretary of commerce and Deputy Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York