Excerpt: In their Pensions Institute paper, David Blake, Andrew Cairns and Keith Dowd point out that DC plans are poorly designed. Instead of asking how much employees want to get out of the plan, the focus is on how much they are willing to contribute. 'A well-designed plan will look very much like a defined-benefit plan, offering a promised retirement pension, but without the guarantees implicit in the DB promise,' they argue. One way of achieving this would be for the default fund to target a pension level that is a proportion of final salary.  MORE >>