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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Another Dutch miracle?
— Explaining Dutch and German pension trajectories | | Author(s) | Markus Haverland |
| Journal title | Journal of European Social Policy, vol 11, no 4, November 2001 |
| Pages | pp 308-323 |
| Keywords | Pensions ; Private pensions ; Social policy ; Netherlands ; Germany. |
| Annotation | Despite similarities in policy legacies, political institutions and party systems, the Netherlands and Germany have developed different financial arrangements for their welfare states. Both countries established and extended comprehensive pay-as-you-go (PAYG) financed public pension schemes in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the Netherlands achieved a fully fledged multi-tiered pension system with a strong funded component, while until recently the German system relied almost exclusively on pay-as-you-go financing. The Netherlands has, therefore, a financially more viable and sustainable set of pension arrangements than Germany, at least under the current and foreseeable economic and demographic conditions. This paper reconstructs the pension trajectories in the two countries, to explore the role of path dependency, political choice and contingency in explaining this divergence. It is argued that divergence is essentially unrelated to different strategic choices or variations in institutional capacities for reform. Instead, divergence is the largely unintended consequence of a series of incremental decisions in combination with contingent events and developments. (KJ/RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-020107202 A |
| Classmark | JJ: JK: TM2: 76H: 767 |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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