Ageing and the Transition to Retirement

It is clear that there are two conflicting trends in Europe. Firstly, a demographic shift towards population ageing and secondly, a massive decrease in the labour force participation of older workers (aged 50 years and over). Both trends have re-enforced two socio-economic concerns of most European welfare states. These are the increasing costs for welfare states to finance "pathways" from employment to official retirement, and the threat of labour market shortages in the near future as a result of both the ageing process and the early exit of older workers. Consequently, a variety of new policy initiatives can be observed in many European countries. After years of excluding older workers from the labour market, we can now observe a trend in many countries to "re-integrate" them again. The combination of two trends, an ageing society and the massive early exit from the labour market of past decades, have also resulted in re-definitions of the social meaning of ageing, older workers, the transition from work to retirement and - on a more general level - the meaning of social citizenship. This book offers a refined and authoritative understanding of the changing ways the end of the working life is organized under different welfare state arrangements in ten EU countries plus Hungary, Slovakia and Norway. The authors consider: how changes in work and the life-course affect the relationship between ageing and work; which "pathways" out of the working life are available and what programmes or initiatives have been developed to change early exit into late exit or to re-integrate older workers in the labour market; and what the individual perspective on the relation between ageing and work is and how different institutions design the life course.