18 - Inside pension scheme governance

Summary

Pension scheme governance is a subject that defies straightforward categorisations. From a legal point of view, it is a hybrid of trust law, company law, fiscal law and employment law, with a dense and detailed statutory overlay. For financial economists, the focus is on pension schemes as capital market actors with a distinctive approach to investment strategy, which has wider macroeconomic implications. Management studies would see pension funds as institutional shareholders with the potential to shape the governance structures and managerial practices of their investee companies. For historians of social policy, occupational pension schemes are understood as mostly complementing, but in some contexts as competing with, the various forms of direct state provision for retirement. Few of these disciplines have seen pension scheme governance as a subject of study in its own right, but that is changing as the enormous practical significance of the issues at stake becomes clear. Pension scheme governance directly affects the savings plans and income security of millions of workers and beneficiaries, with consequences for the efficiency and sustainability of the corporate sector, macroeconomic stability and the capacity of government to deliver on social policy goals.