Average life expectancy continued to rise sharply over the period, however. When it then became increasingly obvious during the 1990s that the ATP system was also going to be under-financed, a number of years of political debate passed before a majority of the Swedish parliament could agree on a new pension system that would be sustainable in the long term. With the implementation of the premium-reserve pension reform of 1998, a system was created that indeed is not guaranteed to result in high pensions for pension savers, but that at least will enable the public finances to bear the costs as an increasing number of people retire. However, Sweden is not the only country to be facing a difficult demographic challenge, quite the reverse. In the euro area, some countries will have a considerably larger frequency of retirement in the coming decades, which means that in 30 years there will be twice the number of pensioners per worker compared with today. Nevertheless, until recently pension reforms in most euro area countries have been conspicuous by their absence. In addition, the majority of these countries have only used a system whereby current pensioners are paid directly by current workers, and no funds have been reserved. The fact that this is unsustainable in the long run has been obvious for a long period. Yet, it has been politically impossible to bring about the kind of reforms that we in Sweden succeeded in introducing through political accord.
Risk management is in line with what we have stated in it, particularly in relation to the Strengthening of the Policy Framework, including the identification of emerging risks and trends, as well as the incorporation of the concept of sustainability across all areas of the Bank's work. The aim is to strengthen the policy with an integral view of the processes and associated risks. Contents of this Meeting In recent decades, central banks have confronted new challenges in their risk management. The great financial crisis and later the Covid-19 pandemic triggered both a qualitative and a quantitative change in the operations of central banks, which was reflected in the size and composition of their balance sheets. For example, the Fed's balance sheet went from less than 10% of GDP in 2007 to close to 40% in 2022. In the case of the Eurozone, the increase was even greater, as it went from just over 10% to a maximum of 70% in the same period. As for the Central Bank of Chile, the size of the balance sheet stood at between 10 and 20 percent of GDP until 2019, peaking at just over 30 percent in 2021. From then on, as operations that arose during the pandemic have expired, it has been declining and by the end of 2022 it stood at 26.2 percent of GDP. Measures to provide liquidity to economies exposed to unprecedented shocks, in extraordinarily complex and uncertain circumstances, drove central banks to implement unconventional monetary policies.