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Work after Retirement or Work Instead of Retirement?
In Europe the problem of population aging has aroused much worry. The debates on aging populations in need of care, consuming lots of resources, have been common. Consequently, the raising of the retirement age has been one of the themes in the discussion. There is strong opposition against increases in the retirement age. Therefore, alternatives are needed. There are also spontaneous developments which affect the retirement age debate. One alternative which has been tested is the elimination or raise in the upper age limit for retirement. In Finland people may retire already at 63 or 65, but they have to retire at 67 or 68. This upper limit could be raised to 70 without much protest, or eliminated completely.
Another new development is the combination of retirement and (paid) work. This has increased very quickly in the developed countries. One explanation is low pensions and/or need for good health coverage. But in countries where the level of pensions is decent, the reasons for working are mainly on the pull side. The retirees are healthy and wish to stay in the work life. This means that they do not wish to work full time, but on the other hand are not primarily interested in remuneration. In fact, there seems to be also an increase in the unpaid work, which is difficult to follow statistically.
In our Finnish Generational Transfers study we follow the Finnish baby boomers (born 1945-1950) and their activities. From our data we can see that working when retired is quite common and has interesting correlations with education, income, happiness etc. The paper will present these results and compare them to data from other European countries. On the basis of these results some recommendations about retirement policies are made.