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October 18, 2026
Partner, Chief Economist
Germany is hosting its Invest in Germany Summit this week, against the backdrop of rising investment needs in AI, infrastructure, defense and energy resilience.
Meeting these longer-term investment needs will require public and private capital across both credit and equity markets. And Germany starts with a relatively small pool of domestic institutional capital.
Germany has the least-funded pension system of any major advanced economy. Funded pension assets are only around 7% of GDP against 149% in Sweden and 185% in Canada. Furthermore, German occupational pension schemes allocate just 14% to equities, compared with 34% across the EU and around 50% in the US, see chart below.
Yet Germany has the highest household savings rate in Europe, with much of household wealth held in deposits.
This is why pension reform matters beyond retirement policy. The reforms now under way could ultimately generate around €90 billion of new annual funded pension flows, equivalent to roughly 2% of GDP.
The bottom line is that Germany is trying to increase investment at the same time as it builds a much larger domestic pool of long-term savings. Pension reform could help connect the two.
We look at the numbers, the reforms and the implications for capital markets in our new presentation on German pension reform, available here.
Written by Huw van Steenis
Sources: European Commission (2025), Staff Working Document, Table 35 (EU); Federal Reserve, Financial Accounts Z.1, Table S.129.s (US); Pensions Policy Institute (2025), Pension Scheme Assets, Figure 2 (UK); and Statistics Canada (2025), Trusteed Pension Funds, Q4 2024 (Canada); caveat: figures are not fully comparable, as the EU covers occupational pension institutions, the US includes public and private pensions and non-equity mutual funds, the UK includes broader retirement assets but excludes private equity, and Canada includes public and private occupational pensions with equity exposure estimated from reported data, Apollo European and Policy Strategist.
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