Ensuring active ageing, i.e. the optimisation of opportunities for health, participation and security in order to enhance quality of life as people age, is an important growth strategy for the EU. Achieving a successful active ageing policy will require a sea change in thinking about what ageing...

Worksharing is considered by many as a promising public policy to reduce unemployment. In this paper we present a review of the most pertinent theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature on worksharing. In addition, we also provide new empirical evidence on this issue, by a cross...

The paper examines social security (public pension) reforms in which the programme is partially shifted from a public unfunded basis to a private, prefunded, basis. It focuses on reforms where individuals have a choice in switching from public funded to private unfunded programmes (as in the...

This paper surveys a dozen international comparative studies of poverty, income distribution and older people in industrialized countries using data up to the mid-1990s. It addresses a series of questions. At what level are the incomes of the elderly relative to the population as a whole? How...

Reforming pensions looms large over the policy agenda of OECD countries. This is hardly surprising since public spending on pensions accounted on average for 7 per cent of OECD GDP in 2005; and this pension spending effort is set to increase significantly over the coming decades in response to...