The Evolving Retirement Income Package : Trends in Adequacy and Equality in Nine OECD Countries

In 1998, the OECD issued a report, Maintaining Prosperity in an Ageing Society, on the widespread policy implications of ageing. This study is a background paper for one of the follow-up studies, Ageing and Income: Financial Resources and Retirement in Nine OECD countries, which was published by OECD in 2001. Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States participated in this activity. Japan played a major role in initiating and funding the project. This paper explores various questions related to the income situation of persons at retirement-age It is based on the most comprehensive data available for the nine participating countries (including, for the first time, Japanese data) in a consistent and comparative way. Recently developed techniques were employed to examine the interactions between the evolution of the retirement income package, and trends in income adequacy and equality. There are four main ...