著者

吉田 健三

出版者

社会政策学会

雑誌

社会政策学会誌

巻号頁・発行日

no.18, pp.228-249, 2007-09-30

---

Since 2004, the Bush administration has emphasized an "ownership society" as a key political concept. This concept includes promoting the "ownership" of retirement income as a significant aspect. In 2005, the administration assigned top priority to introducing the individual account system into the Social Security. This idea signified the application of a structural change in the private pension system to the public pension system, namely the introduction of defined contribution plans, such as 401(k)s. This paper examines the historical implications and the economic basis of retirement income ownership by analyzing the characteristics of defined contribution plans. It arrives at two primary conclusions. First, ownership of pensions has made participants independent of their employers. In defined contribution plans, the employer does not have the discretionary power to forfeit and reduce the benefits of the participants. It is a subject that the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) and a series of legislation on retirement income security tried to cover for defined benefit plans. Further, participants in defined contribution plans can decide how to manage their pension assets independently from their employers. Second, the ownership of pensions also signifies the involvement of participants in a new economic order instead of the old order, industrial relations. In defined contribution plans, participants are dependent on plan providers, whose financial services incorporate a condition according to which participants can "own" their pensions. Participants need plan providers to manage their assets and generate profits from them. Such services are an application of services for individual investors and have been developed in order to promote various investment options to middle-class families. Hence, the independence of pension participants, or the ownership of the pension, is based on a specific historical condition-developing the financial business for middle-class individuals, which is also referred as the "money revolution." These findings suggest the emergence of new political issues over the ownership of pensions. In traditional defined benefit plans, the primary objective of retirement income policy is to coordinate industrial relationships, with a special focus on securing employees' rights from employers. However, in defined contribution plans, it is also important to adjust for the conflict of interests between participants and financial institutions. For instance, disclosure of service fees and deregulation of investment management, banned under ERISA for potential conflicts of interest, have emerged as the main issue of retirement income policy since the rapid growth of defined contribution plans.