Trends in Working Life Expectancy in Europe

Loichinger, Elke; Weber, Daniela

doi:10.1177/0898264316656509

Cited by 74 publications

(88 citation statements)

References 9 publications

(11 reference statements)

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“…Estimates for a longer list of countries are routinely published by Eurostat (Loichinger and Weber 2016), but are built on prevalence based Sullivan's method, which can produce severely biased estimates in particular if the incidence rates are changing (e.g. Mathers and Robine 1997).…”

Section: Working Life Expectancymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…); i.e., the average number of years spent in employment over the life course. Several slightly differing definitions of and alternative terms for WLE are used in the literature, such as worklife expectancy or labor market life expectancy (Hoem 1977;Loichinger and Weber 2016). WLE summarizes the length of working trajectories in a single number, and is thus a useful indicator of the sustainability of pension systems and labor markets in general.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Legacy of the Great Recession in Italy: A Wider Geographical, Gender, and Generational Gap in Working Life Expectancy

2018

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Under the pressure of population aging the Italian pension system has undergone reforms to increase labor force participation and retirement age, and, thus, the length of working life. However, how the duration of working life has developed in recent years is not well understood. This paper is the first to analyze trends in working life expectancy in Italy. We use data from a nationally representative longitudinal sample of 880,000 individuals from 2003 to 2013 and estimate working life expectancy by gender, occupational category, and region of residence using a Markov chain approach. We document large and increasing heterogeneity in the length of working life. From 2003From -2004From to 2012From -2013, working life expectancy for men declined from 35.2 to 27.2 years and for women from 34.7 to 23.7 years, increasing the gender gap to 3.5 years. Both young and old were hit, as roughly half of the decline was attributable to ages below 40, half above 40. Working life expectancy declined for all occupational groups, but those in manual occupations lost most, 8.5 years (men) and 10.5 years (women). The North-South economic gradient widened such that men living in the North were expected to work 8 years longer than women living in the South. The fraction of working life of total life expectancy at age 15 declined to record lows at 40% for men and 34% for women in 2012-2013. Policies aiming Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https ://doi.org/10.1007/s1120 5-018-1910-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. 3at increasing total population working life expectancy need to take into consideration the socio-demographic disparities highlighted by our results.

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Section: Working Life Expectancymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Legacy of the Great Recession in Italy: A Wider Geographical, Gender, and Generational Gap in Working Life Expectancy

2018

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“…Indeed, evidence is mounting that the life years gained with greater longevity are increasingly spent in good health (e.g., Sanderson & Scherbov, 2010), implying that, in principle, working lives can be extended so as to avoid an increase in old-age dependency (e.g., Loichinger & Weber, 2016). 7 The extent to which increases in healthy life span translate into the elderly's higher labor force participation varies strongly across countries, depending on the retirement incentives from the pension scheme, among other factors (Milligan & Wise, 2015).…”

Section: The Channels By Which Health Affects Economic Growth In Devementioning

confidence: 99%

Health and Economic Growth

Bloom¹,

Kühn²,

Prettner³

2019

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance

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The strong observable correlation between health and economic growth is crucial for economic development and sustained well-being, but the underlying causality and mechanisms are difficult to conceptualize. Three issues are of central concern. First, assessing and disentangling causality between health and economic growth are empirically challenging. Second, the relation between health and economic growth changes over the process of economic development. In less developed countries, poor health often reduces labor force participation, particularly among women, and deters investments in education such that fertility stays high and the economy remains trapped in a stagnation equilibrium. By contrast, in more developed countries, health investments primarily lead to rising longevity, which may not significantly affect labor force participation and workforce productivity. Third, different dimensions of health (mortality vs. morbidity, children’s and women’s health, and health at older ages) relate to different economic effects. By changing the duration and riskiness of the life course, mortality affects individual investment choices, whereas morbidity relates more directly to work productivity and education. Children’s health affects their education and has long-lasting implications for labor force participation and productivity later in life. Women’s health is associated with substantial intergenerational spillover effects and influences women’s empowerment and fertility decisions. Finally, health at older ages has implications for retirement and care.

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“…As for the more specific relationship between education and timing of retirement, the evidence is scarcer, although the hypothesis outlined in this paper has been tested before, and found support. Several researchers argue that higher retirement age is associated with education expansion (Loichinger and Weber, 2016;Rehkopf, Adler and Rowe, 2016;Schirle, 2008). This is due to higher work capacity, which makes higher educated people more competitive in the labor market even in higher ages than their less educated peers (Monteiro, Ilmarinen and Filho, 2006;Boissonneault, 2018), although Coile, Milligan and Wise (2017) can support employability increasing with education only among women.…”

Section: Population Aging and The Proportion Of Active And Inactive Lmentioning

confidence: 99%

Participation and Postponed Retirement in Central and Eastern Europe

Gál¹,

Radó²

2019

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This paper shows how the effective retirement age rose in eight countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia) between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s. It finds that the increase was fast enough to keep life expectancies at the effective retirement age practically unchanged. Every day an average worker of the region got closer to the effective retirement age by only 18.4 hours, instead of 24, because the effective retirement age was moving. In effect, the labor market absorbed all improvements in life expectancies in older working ages. The paper also shows how the educational composition in older working age, specifically in the 55-64-year-old age bracket, improved over the same period, establishing the growth of the effective retirement age. This relatively recent shift is traced back to human capital investments made decades before, specifically the spread of secondary education starting in the 1960s. Finally, the paper shows that maintaining the current life expectancies at retirement over the next 30 years requires less effort in terms of further raising the effective retirement age than what the region achieved in this respect in the last 15 years. Since the countries discussed improved their education systems in recent decades by expanding tertiary enrollment among currently young cohorts, an additional increase in the effective retirement age in the future can be expected, possibly even fending off most of the potentially negative effects of declining mortality. . Any remaining errors are those of the authors.2 Population-weighted regional averages based on the baseline population projection of Eurostat.

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Trends in Working Life Expectancy in Europe

Abstract: The analysis of trends in WLE at age 50, particularly when set in relation to remaining LE, provides useful insights about the development of the distribution of economically active and inactive years in Europe's aging societies.

Cited by 74 publications

References 9 publications

The Legacy of the Great Recession in Italy: A Wider Geographical, Gender, and Generational Gap in Working Life Expectancy

The Legacy of the Great Recession in Italy: A Wider Geographical, Gender, and Generational Gap in Working Life Expectancy

Health and Economic Growth

Participation and Postponed Retirement in Central and Eastern Europe

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