List of Working Papers on Ageing and Income (2000-2001)
Ageing and Income: Financial Resources and Retirement in Nine OECD Countries 2001 is a landmark study of the material well-being of older people in Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. It uses a wealth of new data to shed light on the challenges that face policy-makers as they anticipate the coming retirement of the baby-boom generation. The findings are often surprising. In all the countries surveyed, policies have been fundamentally successful: older people at all income levels tend to maintain or even increase their material standards of living once they stop working. This happens despite large differences in approaches to public policy, including the size of public pensions. The systems that provide resources to older people are considerably more complex than is usually taken into account in policy-making, and the effects of policy, while large, are less direct than often thought. Demography and changing labour market patterns make reforms to these systems imperative.