Social Security and Retirement in The Netherlands

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Compared to other industrialized countries, the labor force participation of the elderly in the Netherlands is very low. Moreover, it has fallen very fast over recent years. We discuss the incentives for employees to retire, arising from public schemes such as social security and disability insurance, and from private arrangements, such as early retirement and occupational pensions. In general, the generous replacement rates offered by these schemes act as powerful stimuli for retirement. Although Dutch research into the retirement effects of the earnings replacing schemes for the elderly was limited until the early nineties, there is now a fast growing literature on this. This literature confirms the findings in the current paper.

Published:

• Van Praag, Bernard M. S. and Arie Kapteyn as "Further Evidence on the Individual Welfare Function of Income: An Empirical Investigation in the Netherlands," European Economic Review, Vol. 4, no. 1 (April 1973): 33-62 ,
• van Soest, Arthur, Isolde Woittiez, and Arie Kapteyn as "Labor Supply, Income Taxes, and Hours Restrictions in the Netherlands", Journal of Human Resources, Vol. 25, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 517-558 ,
• "Social Security and Labor-Force Participation in the Netherlands," American Economic Review, Vol. 88, no. 2 (May 1998): 164-167 ,
• Social Security and Retirement in the Netherlands, Arie Kapteyn, Klaas de Vos, in Social Security and Retirement around the World (1999), University of Chicago Press
  

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