scholarly journals Planned Retirement Timing in Europe: Are Europeans Adapting to the Policy of Extending Working Lives

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moritz Hess ◽  
Laura Naegele ◽  
Lena Becker ◽  
Jana Mäcken ◽  
Wouter De Tavernier

As populations are ageing concerns regarding the sustainability of European welfare states have come to the forefront. In reaction, policy makers have implemented measurements aimed at the prolongation of working lives. This study investigates weather older workers have adapted their planned retirement age, as a result of this new policy credo. Based on data from Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) the analysis shows an increase of the planned retirement age (1.36 years) across all ten European countries investigated, albeit with country-specific variations. Variations on the individual level can be detected in regard to gender, education and self-reported health status.

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-694
Author(s):  
Michael McGann ◽  
Dina Bowman ◽  
Simon Biggs ◽  
Helen Kimberley

Issues related to population ageing and longer working lives span diverse research areas and are linked to a number of conceptual and policy debates. Here we provide details of texts which allow quick access to key debates in the different domains covered by the contributions. We focus first on social policy, retirement and pensions. We then provide key sources on the changing experiences and perceptions of retirement; age-discrimination, human resource management and older workers; and early exit, mature-age unemployment and activating older workers.


Author(s):  
Andrea Principi ◽  
Jürgen Bauknecht ◽  
Mirko Di Rosa ◽  
Marco Socci

This paper identifies, within companies’ sectors of activity, predictors of Human Resource (HR) policies to extend working life (EWL) in light of increasing policy efforts at the European level to extend working life. Three types of EWL practices are investigated: the prevention of early retirement (i.e., encouraging employees to continue working until the legal retirement age); delay of retirement (i.e., encouraging employees to continue working beyond the legal retirement age); and, recruitment of employees who are already retired (i.e., unretirement). A sample of 4624 European organizations that was stratified by size and sector is analyzed in six countries. The main drivers for companies’ EWL practices are the implementation of measures for older workers to improve their performance, their working conditions, and to reduce costs. In industry, the qualities and skills of older workers could be more valued than in other sectors, while the adoption of EWL practices might be less affected by external economic and labor market factors in the public sector. Dutch and Italian employers may be less prone than others to extend working lives. These results underline the importance of raising employers’ awareness and increase their actions to extend employees’ working lives by adopting age management initiatives, especially in SMEs, and in the services and public sectors.


After outlining the key aspects of the changing social, cultural, and policy context of parenting in Western societies, the introduction clarifies terminology and key concepts used throughout the book, such as the distinction among fatherhood, fathering, and types of fathers. It also presents the theoretical framework used to examine father involvement with young children in six countries. This includes the fatherhood regime, fathers’ agency gap and capability to care for children, and gendered care and workplace cultures. In addition, the structural context of welfare states and policy regimes is reviewed to frame the institutional support for father involvement, such as compensated paternity and parental leave. At the individual level father involvement is conceptualized as encompassing engagement, accessibility and responsibility as expressed in the type and quantity of time of fathers’ activities with their young children. Finally, the chapter briefly outlines the structure of the book.


Author(s):  
Jérôme Gautié ◽  
Sophie Ponthieux

This article examines the phenomenon of working poverty and issues relating to employment and the working poor. It first provides an overview of the problems of definition and measurement regarding the working poor, along with the consequences of the diversity of definitions. In particular, it considers different current definitions of the statistical category “working poor” and how definitions affect the assessment of the in-work poverty phenomenon. It also provides a “statistical” portrait of the working poor and explores how the risk of working poverty has evolved in the 2000s. Finally, it discusses the causes of working poverty, including low income at the individual level and the role of welfare states, and outlines potential remedies in terms of public policies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S129-S129
Author(s):  
Aine Ni Leime

Abstract Many governments including the US and Ireland have been advocating longer working lives for all workers to ensure pension sustainability in the light of population ageing. Policy changes encouraging increased social security/state pensions age reflect this. However, there has been limited investigation of how the gender implications of these policy changes. While longer working lives may be attractive for some workers, there is evidence that women and men have profoundly different work-life trajectories and women may be more financially disadvantaged approaching retirement age. There is a need to explore how this affects their ability and/or desire to continue working past traditional retirement age and their financial security. This presentation is based on analysis of evidence from an EU-funded cross-national research project involving work-life history interviews conducted with forty older workers in academia in the US and Ireland in 2016 and 2017. A lifecourse approach is used to analyse interview data from ten male and ten female academics in Ireland and ten male and ten female academics in the US, aged 50 or over. Participants discussed early influences, work-life history and health concerns. The paper uses a cumulative disadvantage perspective to analyse how gender, family and health trajectories across the life course affect and can limit options around late work and retirement. It concludes that gender differences regarding norms of care-giving are important and that extending working life is more likely to be caused by financial necessity for women. The implications for future research and policy are discussed.


Author(s):  
Thomas D. Schuster ◽  
John Byrne ◽  
James Corbett ◽  
Yda Schreuder

Members of carsharing organizations reduce both the number of vehicles owned and vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Given these benefits at the individual level, carsharing may interest policy makers as another tool to address the negative environmental, economic, and social consequences of automobile dependence. However, the aggregate effects of carsharing must be estimated before sound policy decisions can be made. This paper describes a Monte Carlo simulation of the economic decision to own or share a vehicle on the basis of major cost components and past vehicle use. The simulation estimates the percentage of vehicles that would be cheaper to share than own. In Baltimore, Maryland, this result ranged from 4.2% under a traditional neighborhood carsharing model to 14.8% in a commuter-based carsharing model. Sensitivity analyses identified travel time and VMT as the most important economic factors, which likely incorporate other factors such as transit access and environmental attitudes. Because travel behavior, not ownership cost, drives the economic carsharing decision, the model hypothesizes that there will be increasing marginal societal benefits from policies that promote carsharing. The model can be applied to any geographic area and can be used to assess carsharing impacts of various policies that change the economics of owning or driving an auto. These results indicate that carsharing can become prevalent enough to be considered an important policy tool.


2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 677-704 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jukka Savolainen ◽  
Jukka Savolainen ◽  
Lorine A. Hughes ◽  
Jukka Savolainen ◽  
Lorine A. Hughes ◽  
...  

Abstract This research examined cross-national differences in the association between social class and delinquency. The poverty hypothesis expects socioeconomic disadvantage to exert a causal influence on delinquent behavior. This expectation implies that the individual-level association between family SES and delinquent offending will be attenuated at increased levels of collective social protection. The social selection perspective also assumes a negative relationship between SES and delinquency but explains it away as a spurious consequence of intergenerational transmission of antisocial propensity. In light of comparative research on social stratification, the selection perspective suggests that the association between low parental SES and offspring criminality may be stronger in advanced welfare states due to reduced influence of ascribed characteristics on socioeconomic attainment in these countries. Survey data from 26 European countries (n=78,703) were used to evaluate the validity of these conflicting hypotheses. In support of the selection perspective, results showed that class differences in delinquent offending are larger in more advanced welfare states.


2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 873-891 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Dodson

Resurgent interest in the role of economic threat in fostering movement participation has highlighted the importance of economic change. However, many of the insights of this approach are drawn from case studies of specific movements. Comparative research on economic threat has been relatively absent, leaving open the possibility that the influence of threat is limited to certain contexts. To remedy the empirical gap, this study takes advantage of a standardized, cross-national dataset (the 2004 International Social Survey Programme) to evaluate the recent claims. Using changes in the unemployment rate as a measure of economic threat, the results suggest that the mobilizing effects of economic uncertainty are strongest among those individuals who are most vulnerable to economic change—in this case, manual workers in liberal welfare states. By contrast, workers with more economic protection—either by virtue of their occupational position or their access to a more generous welfare system—are largely unresponsive to changing labor market conditions. The findings highlight the relevance of two sources of economic protection: social class at the individual level and welfare policies at the national level. The importance of focusing on the intersection of these levels and the benefits of a comparative approach to understanding the emergence of economic threat are discussed in conclusion.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bin Yu ◽  
Miyang Luo ◽  
Meijing Liu ◽  
Junmin Zhou ◽  
Shujuan Yang ◽  
...  

Introduction: Social capital, the effective functioning of social groups through networks of relationships, can affect mental health and may be affected by COVID-19. We aimed to examine the changes in social capital before and after the COVID-19 lockdown among the Chinese youth.Methods: A national convenience sample of 10,540 high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, from the COVID-19 Impact on Lifestyle Change Survey (COINLICS), reported their demographic and social capital information before and after the COVID-19 lockdown. Social capital was retrospectively measured at four levels: individual (ISC), family (FSC), community (CSC), and society (SSC). The changes of social capital were also compared across three educational levels.Results: Overall, ISC and CSC scores generally decreased after lockdown (15.1 to 14.8 and 13.4 to 13.1, respectively), while FSC and SSC scores increased significantly (12.7 to 13.0 and 7.1 to 7.2, respectively). At the individual level, most participants showed a constant perceived social capital; more of the remaining participants showed decreased than increased ISC (30.5% vs. 17.0%) and CSC scores (28.4% vs. 19.1%), while more participants showed increased than decreased FSC (21.7% vs. 9.2%) and SSC scores (10.3% vs. 3.9%). Heterogeneities in social capital changes existed across educational levels.Conclusions: Our findings would provide health professionals and policy-makers solid evidence on the changes in social capital of youths after lockdowns, and therefore help the design of future interventions to rebuild or improve their social capital after epidemics/disasters.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Malgorzata Schonder

This empirical study contributes to the question of whether there is a difference in the influence of religious beliefs and affiliation on the sense of coherence between young people from a secular country (such as Germany) and a Catholic country (such as Poland). To empirically capture the sense of coherence a surevy on life orientation was used. Under the concept of „Religeous Beliefs“ it examinded religious convictions, organized and non-organized religious activities. The random sample included 2266 students from Germany and Poland. The participants had Protestant, Catholic, and Buddhist religious affiliations, as well as no religious affiliation. At the individual level, where sense of cohernece was only examined in relation to indicators of religious beliefs, having a religious conviction shows positive effects on students’ sense of coherence. However, its relevance is country-specific. Going to church and being affiliated with a religion has a stronger influence on Polish students’ sense of coherence than on German students.


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