An Examination of Work Among Older Individuals, By Country
About
What factors best explain different country employment rates for older individuals?
There does not appear to be a strong correlation between prolonged work among the elderly and either the age of retirement or life expectancy at birth. This lack of correlation isn’t surprising for the age of retirement, for which there is surprisingly little variation across countries. The retirement age in the U.S. (67) is two years above the international median, although U.S. life expectancy is four years below that median.[1] This means that there is greater pressure in the U.S. than in other countries to continue to devote a higher proportion of individuals’ remaining years alive to working. In fact, the difference between life expectancy minus the normal retirement age is six years lower in the U.S. than in other countries.[2]
Nor is there a correlation between inequality and the likelihood of working at older ages, as countries with both low and high poverty rates are among the countries where working at older ages is most common.[3] The same lack of correlation occurs when examining relatively wealthy versus relatively poor countries, as measured by per capita GDP (in U.S. dollars).
Working patterns at later ages seem best correlated with geographical proximity, although obviously this isn’t always true, as at some degree of distance the pattern changes. For example, France and Belgium have similar patterns, as do Japan and Korea, the Baltic centers (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), the U.S. and Canada, and the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Finland). There are certainly exceptions to this pattern, but geographic country proximity explains elderly working patterns much better than the other factors examined here.
[1] Note that the available life expectancy data only include the first year of the pandemic, which significantly shortened life expectancy in many countries (the U.S. among them), although not as much in countries that had high vaccination rates and where the pandemic arrived somewhat later. U.S. life expectancy dropped for two consecutive years in 2020 and 2021, falling to a provisional 76.1 years in 2021.
[2] The difference between the international median of 14 years and the U.S. average is four years, but as the normal U.S. retirement age is two years above the international median, the effective difference is six rather than four years.
[3] International poverty rates are essentially measures of income inequality, as – unlike the U.S. poverty rate where the poverty line is set at a fixed income, international poverty measures the proportion of the population below half the median income (i.e., a relative rather than a fixed level).
Materials
Comments
Content Details
Topics:
Target Populations:
Programs:
Geographic Locations:
Industry Sectors:
- Last Updated:
- Created:
- Resource Publication Date: 2023
- Posted by: Kevin Mauro
- Posted in: Older Workers