The Commission’s 2011 and 2012 Annual Growth Surveys (AGS) had already highlighted key orientations for pension reforms. It was recommended to link the retirement age with increases in life expectancy, restrict access to early retirement schemes, and support longer working lives.
As the White Paper points out, increasing effective retirement ages and linking the pensionable age to life expectancy could help stabilise the balance between working years and years in retirement which is considered to be of key importance for future sustainability. Policies should aim to raise employment rates especially for higher age groups, women, migrants, and youths, equalize the pensionable age of men and women, and support the development of safe complementary retirement savings to enhance retirement incomes. To keep older workers longer in the labour market, “the adaptation of work places and work organisation, the promotion of lifelong learning, cost-effective policies aiming at reconciling work, private and family life, measures to support healthy ageing and combating gender inequalities and age discrimination” are required. Also, flexible working arrangements could be developed, for example, by combining part-time work and partial pension receipt, as well as ‘second careers’ and ‘end-of-career’ jobs. Disincentives to employment and longer working lives in tax-benefit and remunation systems, as well as to professional mobility and labour market flexibility in cross-national pension transfer regulations, should be removed.
However, it has to be taken into account that the ability to work and to find employment differs widely between individuals. “(…) Life expectancy and health status at age 60 or age 65 tends to be lower for manual workers who started working at a young age”. Furthermore, the paper also points out that raising the effective retirement age will not be about young versus old, but about finding the right balance between them. “Staying active during some of the extra life years gained does not mean that older people are being deprived of their well-deserved retirement for the benefit of the young. Neither does it mean that older workers will keep jobs that would otherwise be available to younger workers.”
Even if the White Paper considers that the main responsibility remains with the Member States, the role of the EU in helping achieve these goals would become more important. “Member States, European institutions and all stakeholders, in particular social partners, need to respond together and within their respective roles, to the challenges that population ageing represents.”
Find further material:
White Paper “An Agenda for Adequate, Safe and Sustainable Pensions”
Press Release of the European Commission
Press Release of Population Europe with comments from leading demographic experts
Interview with Tommy Bengtsson & Kirk Scott on demographic challenges for the welfare state
Press Kit Active Ageing