Dutch employers have written to MPs urging them to tackle what they see as the “declining earnings capacity of the Dutch economy”, arguing that businesses are investing less and that this threatens the country’s ability to earn enough money to “pay policemen, teachers and the welfare state”. 

“More investments are leaving the Netherlands than coming in,” the country’s two biggest employers organisations, the VNO-NCW and MKB, said in their briefing. “We need to ask ourselves how attractive we still are as a country for – new and existing – companies to do business and invest in.

The business community, together with academics and local mayors, warned in 2021 that “concrete rot” had set in in some key areas and that situation has now worsened, the organisations said in their update to MPs.