GOVERNMENTS would love citizens to build up their own retirement funds so they are less dependent on the state in their old age. Many offer tax incentives for pensions; some have adopted “nudge” policies whereby workers are automatically enrolled in retirement schemes.

The reluctance of workers to save for their old age is usually put down to inertia or impatience—being unable to defer gratification to the distant future. In fact, it may be a rational decision in the face of high charges, confusing products and poor returns.

A new report from the European Federation of Financial Services Users reveals how bad things have been. It finds that, for many savers in Belgium, Britain, France, Italy and Spain, the real (after inflation) returns from private pension schemes have been negative for much of this century. In Spain, for example, pension plans lost 1.2% a year in real terms between 2000 and 2013, while in Britain, they lost 0.7% a year between 2000 and 2012. The effect of charges on returns is substantial: one French equity fund returned just 16% after charges over ten years, compared with a gain for the index it was tracking of 73%.

One of the most revealing parts of the report is the struggle that the researchers had in obtaining the figures. “A lot of data are simply not available at an aggregate and country level,” the authors write; moreover “the complexity of pension savings taxation in EU countries makes it also extremely difficult to compute after-tax returns.” A recent European Commission report on the pensions market had to rely on an OECD survey from 2012 for its data.

This means that the European authorities “do not know the actual performance of the services they are supposed to regulate and supervise”. Since pension pots are often consumers’ second-biggest asset (after their house), this lapse is both astonishing and alarming.