Martin Rein, born in New York City, New York, USA, in 1928. Ph.D. from Brandeis University, Waltham. Professor of Social Policy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.
Guest of the Rector (Winter 2000)
I have divided this report on my activities at NIAS into three sections: lectures, research, and writing. – I was invited by the Institute of Social Security and Demography in Tokyo, Japan to give a series of lectures in Japan on the current research that I am doing on comparative analysis of the political economy of pension reform. The occasion for the lecture was an international conference on social policy in Asian Countries. My task was to provide a Western perspective. In the Netherlands I gave two lectures at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Leiden. At these lectures I reported on my ongoing research on the Dutch welfare state and earlier research on strategies for dealing with controversies in public policy. – As far as my research is concerned, during my stay at NIAS I wanted to learn more about the Dutch welfare state. It is one of the few countries that historically has dealt much earlier than other European countries with creating a public private mix in its pension system. Toward this end I interviewed about a dozen academics, government officials, heads of pension funds, trade union officials and other knowledgeable individuals. I spent most of my time at NIAS drafting chapters for the book that I am writing. The tentative title of the book is, “Rethinking the Welfare State: The Change in the Public-Private Mix”. As of now, the book will have six chapters. – I have decided to send chapters of the book for publication in journals and books. These chapters are best described as work in progress and will have to be revised now that I have a clearer picture of what the overall book will look like. I wrote the chapter on mandatory pensions and revised the other two essays during my stay at NIAS.