In this area I have to be very careful with my words. I got myself into very big trouble with the pension protection fund in the United Kingdom earlier this year.
The first of these insurance-type programs.... We're talking about insurance programs to cover the liabilities of defined benefit plans of companies that go bankrupt when the defined benefit plan is in deficit. My understanding is that Nortel is the one that is of most concern nationally here.
The United States set up the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation in the mid-1970s. At the time there was a bankruptcy of this sort, which forced the political action of setting up the PBGC. Many distinguished economists have written about the PBGC, and as far as I can see, this insurance fund was essentially in very large deficit from day one when it opened. It really acted as a very large subsidy to airlines, steelmakers, and carmakers over the ensuing years.
The pension protection fund in the United Kingdom tried to learn some of the lessons of what went wrong with the PBGC in the U.S. In particular they have tried to risk-rate the premiums that companies must pay to the protection fund so that riskier funds are paying a higher proportion of their assets, but there's only so far you can go in increasing those levies before companies simply begin closing those schemes down.
I'm afraid that I don't think there is a good international example of one of these types of insurance funds. In theory--I'm not referring to any of them in practice, but in theory--they have the danger of becoming something like a black hole. They can suck in a lot of money very quickly.