In line or at odds with active ageing policies? Exploring patterns of retirement preferences in Europe

Abstract

Faced with demographic ageing, European policy makers since the mid-s have taken a turn from fostering early retirement to promoting longer working life by reducing early exit incentives and facilitating work continuation. However, it remains open whether these reforms are yet reflected in the retirement plans and preferences of future pensioners' cohorts. Using most recent data on desired retirement ages from the fifth wave of the European Social Survey (/ wave), this paper empirically investigates how far current policy reforms are in line with the retirement age preferences of older workers aged  and over. Results show that older workers approaching retirement ages still intend to retire before the politically envisioned age of , and in many cases also before nationally defined standard retirement ages. Despite visible progress in implementing active ageing measures, the challenge of motivating older workers to continue working until or even beyond retirement ages thus remains. At the same time, there are regime-specific problem groups that face difficulties in adjusting to the active ageing paradigm of longer working life. Especially in countries with little employment support, those with unstable work careers, employment interruptions and few financial resources are at a high risk of being crowded out from late career employment and thus from the possibility of ensuring a decent standard of living in old age.

Expected and preferred retirement age in Germany

“…This is consistent with previous research showing a preferred retirement age of 61.72 years in Germany [15]. By contrast, the respondents' expected retirement age is much higher (63.58 years), meaning the average employee would like to retire 1.75 years earlier than anticipated.…”

“…Furthermore, gender, age, health status and company size were added to the models. These factors have been shown to affect the correlation of expected and preferred retirement age with education, professional position and income [11,15,29]. Age was included because the rise of the official retirement age is a stepwise process [1] that affects the younger birth cohorts more than the older ones.…”

Retirement Expectations in Germany—Towards Rising Social Inequality?

“…The main argument for studying the expected retirement age is that it is a reasonably precise proxy for the actual retirement timing, since older workers generally have a good knowledge of when they will retire [13,14]. This knowledge is based on a realistic evaluation of the pension system's rules as well as institutional and workplace contexts [33][34][35]. Older workers consider pension systems' and companies' regulations as well as pension deductions for early retirement on the one hand, and pensions increases for postponing retirement on the other [33][34][35].…”

European Top Managers’ Age-Related Workplace Norms and Their Organizations’ Recruitment and Retention Practices Regarding Older Workers

“…Age-related workplace norms may be especially important for issues such as prolonged employment of older workers and their timing of retirement, considering decades of shaping expectations and behavior of people through institutionalization of retirement and public policies (Kohli, 2007;Radl, 2012). For example, the age of 65 is considered the 'normal retirement age' in most of the developed world, which is at the same time a result from and supported by public policies such as state pension ages of 65 in many countries (Hofäcker, 2015).…”