Monday, July 21, 2008

Tutorial: Why should a Dutch retire at 70?

There was already a discussion going on in dutch media if the retirement age had to be increased to 67 from 65. Today's DutchNews quotes the related minister saying that it should be 70.

Then I remembered one stroll-discussion I had with Tjeerd on the woods (weiland) across WKZ.
Well, I had never elaborated on the retirement age discussions before. The points Tjeerd made made quite sense to me; it was a tutorial-like chat :)

So the basic answers to the question is:

  • Dutch people live longer in recent years (the case in all developed countries). This requires more retirement salary/support for government budget. This, in turn, affects the working dutch population since they have to support more retired people. It is getting more interesting if we think that the birth rate is getting lower in the country. So, relatively less and less working people will support more and more retired people. (I wondered if "less people" is grammatically correct: it looks so according to UsingEnglish website.)

  • One solution would be to encourage birth rate increase. However, this is not that logical considering the population density of the country. (It is the densest european country I guess; much denser than Turkey)

  • So, one solution is to increase the age for retirement. In other words, those are why the government is so eager to increase retirement age..

Did I remember correctly Tjeerd? :D

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You are right with your story :)

I also got my knowledge about this subject from the ongoing discussions on internet/newspapers/television.

Argument for working longer is fine for mental/light work I think. But the streetworkers and heavy jobs people you don't want to let them work till they are 70 years old. Their bones could break ;)

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