Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World: The Capacity to Work at Older Ages (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022644287X ISBN 13: 9780226442877

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

In recent years, the retirement age for public pensions has increased across many countries, and additional increases are in progress or under discussion in many more. The seventh stage of an ongoing research project studying the relationship between social security programs and labor force participation, Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World: The Capacity to Work at Older Ages explores people’s capacity to work beyond the current retirement age. It brings together an international team of scholars from twelve countries—Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States—to analyze this issue. Contributors find that many—but not all—individuals have substantial capacity to work at older ages. However, they also consider how policymakers might divide gains in life expectancy between years of work and retirement, as well as the main impediments to longer work life. They consider factors that influence the demand for older workers, as well as the evolution of health and disability status, which may affect labor supply from the older population.
 

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David A. Wise is the John F. Stambaugh Professor of Political Economy Emeritus at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is the former area director of Health and Retirement Programs and director of the Program on the Economics of Aging at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
 

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Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World

The Capacity to Work at Older Ages

By David A. Wise

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2017 National Bureau of Economic Research
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-44287-7

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction Courtney Coile, Kevin Milligan, and David A. Wise, 
1. Work Capacity and Longer Working Lives in Belgium Alain Jousten and Mathieu Lefebvre, 
2. Health Capacity to Work at Older Ages: Evidence from Canada Kevin Milligan and Tammy Schirle, 
3. Health Capacity to Work at Older Ages in Denmark Paul Bingley, Nabanita Datta Gupta, and Peder J. Pedersen, 
4. Health Capacity to Work at Older Ages in France Didier Blanchet, Eve Caroli, Corinne Prost, and Muriel Roger, 
5. Healthy, Happy, and Idle: Estimating the Health Capacity to Work at Older Ages in Germany Hendrik Jürges, Lars Thiel, and Axel Börsch-Supan, 
6. Health Capacity to Work at Older Ages: Evidence from Italy Agar Brugiavini, Giacomo Pasini, and Guglielmo Weber, 
7. Health Capacity to Work at Older Ages: Evidence from Japan Emiko Usui, Satoshi Shimizutani, and Takashi Oshio, 
8. Work Capacity at Older Ages in the Netherlands Adriaan Kalwij, Arie Kapteyn, and Klaas de Vos, 
9. Health Capacity to Work at Older Ages: Evidence from Spain Pilar García-Gómez, Sergi Jiménez-Martín, and Judit Vall Castelló, 
10. Health, Work Capacity, and Retirement in Sweden Per Johansson, Lisa Laun, and Mårten Palme, 
11. Health Capacity to Work at Older Ages: Evidence from the United Kingdom James Banks, Carl Emmerson, and Gemma Tetlow, 
12. Health Capacity to Work at Older Ages: Evidence from the United States Courtney Coile, Kevin Milligan, and David A. Wise, 
Notes, 
Contributors, 
Author Index, 
Subject Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Work Capacity and Longer Working Lives in Belgium

Alain Jousten and Mathieu Lefebvre

1.1 Introduction

Previous waves of this project studied the effect of financial incentives created by formal and de facto (early) retirement programs on an individual's decision to retire, the fiscal impact of such behavior, and reforms' impact thereon. Furthermore, the impact of (early) exits on youth employment and the respective roles of health and program rules as determinants of disability program enrollment have been studied (Dellis et al. 2004; Desmet et al. 2007; Jousten et al. 2010; Jousten, Lefebvre, and Perelman 2012, 2016).

One aspect that most of these papers have essentially bypassed is work-capacity issues. This neglect is all the more striking in a country like Belgium where the public-sphere pension reform debate is to a large degree dominated by such aspects. For example, one often-voiced concern in the debate on prolonging the working life of Belgian workers is that numerous workers do not have the capacity to work longer (even if they wanted or were pushed to) because of physical or mental health and exhaustion problems, or because psychological or material limitations render continued work impossible.

The most extreme incarnation of this concern is the so-called "arduous jobs" discussion that has been raging with particular emphasis since the current coalition government — in power since the middle of 2014 — has embarked on a broader pension-reform project targeting longer effective working lives. This is achieved by closing or delaying early retirement options and working toward a convergence between the various public pension schemes for wage earners, civil servants, and the self-employed. While the government strategy's main thrust mirrors recommendations of a report published by an Expert Committee on Pension Reform 2020–2040 (Expert Committee 2014), individual policy measures show differences between the expert committee and the government proposals.

The broader literature provides some evidence on the link between health and work capacity. For example, relying on indicators of self-assessed health, Van Looy et al. (2014) note that subjective health levels are not any different between those who reduced their working time and those who did not. In contrast, Desmette and Vendramin (2014, 79) find that "positive evaluations on 'general health,' 'physical health' (backache, muscular pain in the upper body, muscular pan in the lower body), and 'psychological health' (depression or anxiety, fatigue and insomnia) are at the highest levels for those who think their current job is sustainable." Similarly, Jousten and Lefebvre (2013) estimate a retirement model for Belgium including health as an explanatory variable and find that it plays a statistically significant role in the individual retirement decision.

The literature, however, also cautions that work ability is only one — though very important — step in the process of keeping individuals at work. Schreurs et al. (2011) argue that "good health may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for retaining older workers," and hence "creating and sustaining a healthy workforce by no means guarantees that older employees will continue working until their official retirement age" as workplace, domestic, or other factors may also influence individuals' effective labor market attachment.

The present chapter focuses on the "necessary condition": good work ability as a precondition for higher employment. In our approach, we focus on the outcome indicator "employment rate" (see figures 1.1 and 1.2) and link it to general indicators of the healthiness of the older population as measured by the mortality and self-assessed health (SAH) of figure 1.3. These figures demonstrate that as we move up across age cohorts at any given point in time, employment rates fall substantially for both sexes — and this despite a generalized upward trend since the mid-1990s. While this decline is part age and part cohort effect, the question remains as to what the impact of health on these trends is.

Section 1.2 proposes an analysis using the Milligan and Wise (2015) methodology, essentially linking mortality and employment across time for those age fifty-five and older. Section 1.3 replaces mortality by a series of health conditions and explores the link between these factors and employment rate at younger ages (fifty to fifty-four) in a first step. In a second step, it proposes a simulation of employment potential at higher ages based on these first-step parameters. Section 1.4 concludes.

1.2 Milligan-Wise Method

Figure 1.4 is a good starting point both for exploring the facts about mortality across time in Belgium, as well as the methodology of Milligan and Wise (2015). The figure plots the instantaneous mortality rate of the Belgian male population as extracted from the Human Mortality Database against the male employment rate in the country as extracted from the EU Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS). We focus on the male population, as Belgian females have experienced a seminal trend toward higher levels of employment and labor force participation over the last decades, hence rendering an isolation of the health from the structural effects hard to implement. The plot of figure 1.4 is done for two years: the recent year, 2012, and a latest possible reference year in the past, 1983. The two outstanding — though unsurprising — facts are: (a) a strong negative relation between mortality and employment rate as age increases, and (b) a seminal trend in mortality rates at equal ages as represented by a leftward shift of the curve...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022644287X
• ISBN 13: 9780226442877
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 406
• Herausgeber: Wise David A.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar