Equivalization of incomes for household composition is accepted practice when measuring poverty but other variations in needs are rarely acknowledged. This paper uses data from two U.K. household surveys to quantify the extra costs of living associated with disability. The extra costs of...

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 analysis presented in this paper indicates that OECD member countries differ significantly in terms of the poverty rate of older retired persons. Making use of the OECD Income Distribution Database and a country-specific relative poverty line, the paper finds that almost 13 per cent of the...

The object of this paper is to examine the impact of type of pension scheme on retirement behaviour. The well-documented decline in the labour-force participation of older women and older men (in particular) is common to most industrialised countries. The proportion of men aged 55 to 64 in...

While other regions — Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America in particular — have been active in pension reform, the Middle East and North Africa have lagged behind. In part this is because of the belief that favourable mean financial problems are still far in the future and pension...

A number of countries have introduced individual, privately managed defined-contribution accounts, where the value of the pension benefit will depend on accumulated contributions and investment returns. These schemes expose workers’ future pension benefits to a number of different risks. To...