Societal Ageing in the Netherlands: A Robust System Dynamics Approach

Societal ageing is a messy problem with diverging stakeholder views regarding the desirability of policy measures. In this paper, we use a System Dynamics model representing the Dutch demographic and social security system to investigate if and when Dutch governmental retirement and healthcare contributions become unaffordable. Following the Robust Decision Making approach, we then design and test policies for reducing the societal costs of ageing, taking into account societal support for these policies. We find that unaffordable societal ageing costs are mainly caused by declining productivity levels and increasing life expectancy: permanent increases in productivity are required to sustain the current social security level. We also find that the recently adopted Dutch retirement age policy is insufficiently robust and that focusing on increasing the actual instead of the formal retirement age may generate more public support.