Casper de Vries, Professor Emeritus of Monetary Economics at Erasmus School of Economics has been invited by BNR Nieuwsradio to talk about the aging population. Also, he got interviewed by Het Financieele Dagblad about this matter. De Vries is also a member of the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), which advises the Dutch government to make efforts to get this issue on the agenda in Brussels.
The Netherlands is going to be hit hard by the aging population, according to a report by the WRR. De Vries says the WRR bases this on events from other countries that are going to hit us. The Netherlands has saved quite a bit for our pensions and we are aging, but less so than other countries. Other EU countries pay pensions from the current account, which puts enormous pressure on their budgets. We are strongly linked to other EU countries, therefore it is also a problem for us.
Employment of older people in the EU is important to combat aging. In 2000, the Netherlands was still at the bottom with a very low labor force participation rate. Now we are well above 60% labor force participation. That means there is still some room to do something about it. The only option according to de Vries is to work more and longer. This does lead to long and difficult discussions in which many people must be persuaded. De Vries therefore indicates that people with heavy jobs should be retrained in time, which is best done with a national plan.