臺大管理論叢 NTU Management Review VOL.29 NO.2

193 NTU Management Review Vol. 29 No. 2 Aug. 2019 Different measures of pension portability have different effects on pension administration, pension finance, and pensioners’ income protection. If a pension plan uses refunds to achieve portability, the administration and financial costs are low. However, this strategy makes participants more vulnerable to the risk of poverty in later life. The strategies of providing vesting rights and service portability complicate pension administration. Furthermore, the financial costs might be higher because these strategies provide more protection to participants. The measure of asset portability can reduce administration cost because it merges multiple accounts into one. If a pension plan changes its portability strategy from offering refunds to allowing assets transfers, this might slightly increase the state’s financial responsibility because the Taiwanese government provides a guarantee on returns for defined-contribution pension plans. Under such a strategy, participants’ old-age income protection is improved because their pension assets will still be held in accounts for investment. Effective measures should be employed to improve Taiwan’s pension portability. The best strategy for public pension plans is to combine the strategies of vesting rights and service portability. Participants in all public pension plans should have vesting rights, and their contribution records should be recognized when they switch to different schemes. Regarding occupational pension plans, the optimal strategy is to add a new option for early leavers that allows them to choose between gaining vesting rights and transferring their pension assets to their new plans. This paper comprehensively reviews the concept of pension portability and compares various strategies employed by selected countries. In addition, this paper uses Taiwan’s pension plans as case studies to analyze the potential effects of different portable strategies and discusses effective measures for improving pension portability. These discussions are relevant to other countries seeking to improve their pension portability. More studies are required to explore the effect of different pension portability strategies on labor mobilization, old-age income protection, and senior citizens’ risk of poverty.