Reforming Dutch Occupational Pension Schemes

Dutch occupational defined-benefit plans suffer from a number of serious weaknesses, including ambiguous ownership of the surplus, back-loading of benefits, and lack of tailor-made risk management. To address these weaknesses, we propose collective individual defined-contribution plans that are actuarially fair. These schemes maintain important strengths of collective schemes, such as mandatory saving, collective procurement and pooling biometric risks. At the same time, they eliminate intergenerational conflicts about risk management and distribution through transparent individual property rights and tailor-made risk profiles. We show how the transitional burden due to the phasing out the back-loading of pension benefits can be addressed without a substantial increase in contributions.