Social Insurance Based on Personal Savings

Many countries have reformed, or plan to reform, their pension system. The trend is to move from an entitlement based system to a system in which contributions accumulate in some form of personal savings account. In recent years proposals have been made to apply a personal savings account also to other elements of social insurance, such as unemployment insurance, social assistance, health care costs and others. This paper presents a simple model and a simulation to compare the lifetime consequences of replacing a wide range of social insurance systems with savings account based social insurance. The results indicate that savings account based social insurance can be designed to provide the same economic security as offered by a generous welfare state, and yet lower marginal taxes considerably.