I can answer about the OECD.
We have just completed a study of the impact on women's retirement incomes of periods out of paid work while caring for children. We've looked at a range of different periods, from one year out of paid work right up to 10 or 15 years. These are for very long periods.
We find that countries have very different policies. In some countries--France, for example--if you take, say, up to five years out of paid work caring for children, your pension is almost fully made up to what it would have been had you continued working; however, once you go beyond five years out of paid work, it diminishes quite rapidly.
In some other countries the pension diminishes straightaway. Every year out of the labour market diminishes the pension. In somewhere like the United Kingdom, you get credits under the basic pension for all the time your children are still of school age, so it's until your children are 16. You could have perhaps 18 or 20 years out of paid work and have that period covered.
We have to come to a much more concrete policy discussion about whether we want to insure people for short periods and make up their full pension, or whether we want to try to somehow spread the money over longer periods out of paid work.
I would also add at this point that many other things can help carers, whether they are carers of children, disabled relatives, older relatives, or others. All these things cost money. If we are working within a given budget constraint, do we want to spend the money on giving people credits in the pension system, which can be quite an expensive thing to do, or do we want to somehow provide respite care, child care services, and so on to help women to combine caring for children, or other caring responsibilities, with paid work?
I'm leaving that as an open question. It is a policy question on which voters and their elected representatives can come to a conclusion, but I think there has to be a trade-off between the pension credits and other services.