Social gerontologists have observed that economic determinism is problematic to the policy-making process and that there are too few inputs from other sources. The purpose of this research is to illustrate how social research can inform the current pension debate which revolves around the issues of raising the age of retirement, the merits of partial retirement and the adequacy of the new Seniors Benefit. An analysis of data on post-retirement workers is presented using the Survey of Ageing and Independence as an example of how social research can make a difference to choices about public pension policies.

Extensive research by demographers and economists has shown that longevity differs across socio-economic status (SES), with low-educated or low-income people living, on average, shorter lives than their better-endowed and wealthier peers. Therefore, a pension system with a unique retirement age is a priori problematic. The usual policy recommendation to address this problem is to differentiate the retirement age by SES. This paper explores the relative merits of partial de-annuitization of public pensions as a way of addressing the (imperfectly assessed) inequality of longevity.

Many south-east European states made the transition from socialist to market economies. All described here had to reform their pension systems to match the new context in which these operated. The experiences of 10 countries are reviewed – seven of which were once part of Yugoslavia. Some countries’ reforms were more radical than others. Five of them merely adapted the Bismarckian systems they had inherited; four others adopted the “three pillar” model that the World Bank had been propagating. One went further than that. The four who followed World Bank model were often forced to backtrack. Whatever the longer-term benefits, they generated their own shorter-term fiscal problems. Nonetheless, the most radical reformer gives some indications of possible ways forward. The south-eastern European states do not have financial markets that can support capitalised/funded pension systems. Nor do they have the resources to pay proportional pensions that, at the same time, keep retired people out of poverty. The article suggests that their governments should concentrate upon improving economic performance to satisfy longer term aspirations and on ensuring that pensioners are able to live properly if not luxuriously by using tax-financed transfer measures. Provision above this level can be secured through savings plans, but it must be accepted that the investments to secure those savings will have to be made abroad.

This paper examines the impact of uncertainties in the future trends of mortality on annuity values in Singapore's compulsory purchase market. We document persistent population mortality improvement trends over the past few decades, which underscores the importance of longevity risk in this market. Using the money's worth framework, we find that the life annuities delivered expected payouts valued at 1.019–1.185 (0.973–1.170) per dollar of annuity premium for males (females). Even in a low mortality improvement scenario, the annuities provide an expected value exceeding 0.950. This suggests that participants in the national annuity pool have access to attractively priced annuities, regardless of sex, product, and premium invested.

After years of pension policy drift in a broader context of global austerity, the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) was enhanced for the first time in 2016 to expand benefits for Canadian workers. This article examines Ontario's central role in these reforms. The deteriorating condition of workplace plans, coupled with rising retirement income insecurity across the province's labour force, generated new sources of negative feedback at the provincial level, fuelling Ontario's campaign for CPP reform beginning in the late 2000s. The political limits of policy drift and layering at the provincial level is considered in relationship to policy making at the national level. As shown, a new period of pension politics emerged in Canada after 2009, in which the historical legacy of CPP's joint governance structure led to a dynamic of “collusive benchmarking,” shaped in large part by political efforts of the Ontario government, leading to CPP enhancement.

Pension reform is one of the top public policy priorities in advanced industrialized countries due to population ageing and the significant weight of pension spending in governments’ budgets. As a result of these concerns European countries have engaged in varying degrees of pension reforms over the last three decades. The extant literature on pension reform focuses on structural, institutional and blame avoidance theories to explain how pension reform take place. Yet, how do different conditions combine to lead to significant pension reform outcomes? To answer this question we analyze a set of 48 pension reform cases in eight European countries since the late 1980s up until 2014 by using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). Our main finding is that institutional, structural or blame avoidance theories cannot account by themselves for instances of significant pension reform. Rather, we find three pathways that combine structural and institutional conditions to lead to significant pension reform.

The article examines to what extent culture is a further piece of the puzzle to explain differences in the labour market participation of older people in Europe. This approach is in clear contrast to the existing literature on that topic which is largely economically oriented and more focused on socio-economic determinants. In the first part, different theoretical conceptions regarding the impact of culture on individual actions are discussed with the aim of developing the concept of work–retirement cultures. In the second part, the article gathers empirical evidence on differences in the work–retirement culture in 22 European societies and analyses the interplay between the work–retirement culture and the labour market participation of people aged between 55 and 64 years using logistic random intercept regression analysis. The analysis draws on the third round of the European Social Survey. The results give some clear indications that the work–retirement culture plays its part in explaining differences in the labour market participation of older people in Europe and thus clarifies that the timing of retirement is not fully determined by pension policies. Accordingly, the results of the study illustrate that it is not sufficient to solely change the legal rules for the transition to retirement. Rather, people need to be additionally convinced of the individual benefits of remaining in employment.

The precarious financial situation of many elderly women in developed countries is well established. Nevertheless, in-depth insight into the persistent vulnerability of this group remains largely absent. In this article, we demonstrate how a specific focus on the interaction between work history, family history and pension regulations can provide greater insight into the mechanisms that produce poverty among elderly women in Belgium. To that end, we make use of register data on some 9,000 women aged 65–71. Data on the poverty risk of these women is linked to career and family data, spanning over 45 years. We find that pension policy can indeed account for the higher poverty risk of some groups of elderly women (e.g. divorcees) as compared to others (e.g. widows). Similarly, pension policy can, to a large extent, directly or indirectly explain how previous lifecourse events, such as marital dissolution or childbirth, affect old-age poverty risk. However, our study also reveals some unexpected findings. Most notably, pension regulations fail to account for the beneficial situation of married women. Indeed, our analyses suggest that capital (income) may prove more decisive than pension rights in explaining the low poverty risk of married women when compared to other marital groups. Drawing from our findings, we conclude with some suggestions as to where pension policy should go from here.

In this article, we raise the question as to whether retirement is lost as we currently know and understand it in Canada. With a selected review, we examine retirement research according to the scope of retirement and the new retirement, possible theoretical developments, the timing of transitions into retirement, and life as a retiree including the quality or lack of pensions. Accordingly, we propose that retirement is undergoing modifications on the basis of several trends that commenced before the 2008 economic downturn. The data would appear to lean towards the emergence of a different type of retirement, insofar as the collective Canadian vision of retirement is lost, notwithstanding the economic meltdown in global markets.