Documents Zaidi, Asghar 6 results

"For many people all over Europe, there is an understanding and an expectation that in old age they will be taken care of by the state. High social security contributions throughout the three or four decades of a working life are rationalised by the prospect of a straightforward transition out of the labour force when the time comes. While this was a reasonable expectation in decades past, a number of factors have combined to cause people all across the continent to feel very anxious about what awaits them once it is time to exit the labour force into retirement. The well-documented demographic transition of many rich European countries is a big factor, as greying populations start to weigh on the sparser younger generations, leading to increasing dependency ratios that would cause any social security system to buckle. The Great Recession has not helped matters, and the austerity measures still crippling many vulnerable European nations will not make anyone in these countries feel optimistic about their post-working lives. The following papers look at different threads of the new reality of ageing in Europe, from pension reform and prolonging the working life to more qualitative aspects such as an analysis of the quality of life of the elderly across Europe. They serve to inform and advise on an important issue that will affect everyone in Europe at some point in their lives."

"This paper reviews changes in pension policies in EU countries between 1995 and 2005 and describes how they might affect risk of poverty for future pensioner populations. The pension landscape in Europe has changed considerably in the past decade and the paper highlights commonalities as well as differences in pension reforms across these countries. A common trend is that the retirement incomes drawn from the public pension systems are on the decline, the changes are likely to shift more risks towards individuals, and there are fewer possibilities of redistribution in favour of the lower income individuals. The paper includes exploratory projections of how the risk of elderly poverty might evolve in the future. The countries where the benefit ratio is set to decline significantly, as expected, would see at-risk-poverty rates increase quite substantially, especially during the period 2025-2050, when the bulk of the decline is expected. This analysis points towards the importance of a more comprehensive assessment of the reforms, in particular in their impact on vulnerable groups (such as women and disabled people with disruptive work history) and in the clarity of the signals they give to individuals in extending their working career if they want to avoid greater risks of poverty during retirement."

"Special pensions for workers in hazardous or arduous jobs have long been a feature of the pension landscape and, recently, they are the subject of a great deal of debate in the pension arenas of many OECD countries. Such pensions are historically rooted in the idea that people who work in hazardous or arduous jobs – say, underground mining – merit special treatment. The rationale for this scheme is that hazardous or arduous work increases mortality and reduces life expectancy, thus reducing the time during which retirement benefits can be enjoyed. This results in such workers being made eligible for earlier access to pension benefits than otherwise available in that country's general pension scheme."

"The active and healthy ageing measure reported here is calculated for the 28 European Union countries, with a specific focus on the current generation of older people and by using the latest data from multiple surveys. It covers diverse aspects of active and healthy ageing, by measuring older people's contribution with respect to not just employment but also their unpaid familial, social and cultural contributions and their independent, healthy and secure living. The article presents the first-of-its-kind quantitative measure of active and healthy ageing in the literature on active and healthy ageing which hitherto has focused largely on concepts, definitions and public policy strategies. In this pursuit, an important contribution of this measure, referred to as the Active Ageing Index (‘AAI'), is that it also captures how countries differ with respect to capacity and enabling environments for active and healthy ageing. The AAI offers a breakdown not just by four domains of active and healthy ageing but also by gender. Key findings are that Sweden comes at the top of the country ranking, followed closely by Denmark, the United Kingdom, Finland, the Netherlands and Ireland. The four southern European countries (Italy, Portugal, Spain and Malta) are middle-ranked countries. Greece and many of the Central European countries are at the bottom, highlighting much greater untapped potentials of active and healthy ageing among older people in these countries and a need for greater policy efforts. Women fare worse than men in most countries, identifying a need for an emphasis on reducing gender disparity in experiences of active and healthy ageing. The AAI tool developed has the potential to identify the social policy mechanisms behind the differential achievements of active and healthy ageing, for example, what active and healthy ageing strategies have driven top performers, and in what respect the bottom-ranked countries have lagged behind."

"This report examines social inequalities in the distribution of freedoms and opportunities among individuals and population subgroups in Europe. Using data from the European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS), the report builds up an evidence base on social inequalities in four critical areas of life: health, standard of living, productive and valued activities, and individual, family and social life. It examines the role of important determinants of social inequalities including gender, age, disability status, employment status and citizenship status, as well as other drivers. The report finds that, in some instances, there is evidence of disadvantages becoming more prevalent and social inequalities widening between the second wave of the EQLS in 2007 and the third wave in 2011. It recommends that growing policy attention to the multidimensional aspects of well-being be coupled with effective public action to address social inequalities and integrated into general policies at the European and Member State levels."

"It is widely accepted that people with disabilities incur additional expenditures on transport, heating, equipment and other items. In this article, we estimate the magnitude of these extra costs of living for adults with disabilities aged 50–65 across 15 countries of Europe using the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) data. Drawing on the standard of living approach of Zaidi and Burchardt, we compare the incomes required by households with and without adults with disabilities to obtain an equivalent standard of living. We advance upon this research by drawing on the cross-nationally harmonized data of adults aged 50+ from the SHARE. The results suggest that there are substantial extra costs of disability in these countries: around 44 percent of income for a household with an adult reporting a work-related disability and somewhat less than 30 percent of income for a household with an adult who receives disability benefits. Applying an equivalization scale based on these figures increases the overall poverty incidence rate, especially for households with disabled adult members. These findings thus have implications for analysing the entitlement and benefit levels for disability support programmes and for devising accurate poverty estimates concerning persons with disabilities."