Ageing and Income: Financial Resources and Retirement in 9 OECD Countries

This landmark study of the material well-being of older people in nine OECD countries—Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States—uses a wealth of new data to shed light on the challenges facing policy-makers as they anticipate the coming retirement of the baby-boom generation. The findings are often surprising. In all the countries surveyed, policies have been fundamentally successful, with older people at all income levels tending to maintain or even increase their material standards of living once they stop working. This happens despite large differences in approaches to public policy, including the size of public pensions. The systems that provide resources to older people are considerably more complex than is usually taken into account in policy-making, and the effects of policy, while large, are less direct than often thought. Ageing and Income examines the many diverse ways in which the nine countries are tackling this challenge and the lessons that have been learned from their experiences.