Expect to hear the sound of rejoicing at the news the UK has stopped the decline of its final salary pension schemes, announced this morning by the National Association of Pension Funds. But the economic effect will be negligible because UK pension schemes behave like short-term investors.

A survey just published by the NAPF shows almost no fall since last year in the number of defined benefit pension schemes, where the sponsoring company guarantees that members will get the money promised to them on retirement: the proportion of open defined benefit schemes had fallen by only 2 percentage points over the course of 2007, from 33% at the start to 31% at the end.