Social Security and Retirement during Transition: Microeconometric Evidence from Slovenia. ENEPRI Research Reports No. 57, 2 September 2008

This paper analyses old-age retirement decisions of Slovenian men and women eligible to retire in the period 1997-2003. In addition to established market economies, relatively high hazard rates of retirement are found, which decline with age. This peculiar pattern can be partly attributed to weak incentives to work inherent in the design of social security and is reflected in predominantly negative values of accruals and to transition-specific increases in wage inequality in the late 1980 and early 1990s. The authors also find that the probability of retirement increases with social security wealth and decreases with net wages, although the response to option value to work, with controlling for wage differences, is rather weak. The results also imply that less educated persons, persons with great private wealth and persons entitled to severance payment are more likely to retire

Social Exclusion of the Elderly: A Comparative Study of EU Member States. ENEPRI Research Reports No. 57, 2 September 2008

Combating social exclusion is one of the key objectives of pension systems. This report focuses on social exclusion among the elderly (defined as the 55+ age group) in the EU’s member states. Social exclusion has been conceptualised as a state of individuals in relation to four dimensions. Two of these dimensions – material deprivation and social rights – are of a structural nature. The other two – social participation and normative integration – pertain to social settings and subcultural factors. Theoretically and empirically, the dimensions refer to one latent underlying social exclusion variable. The original method for measuring social exclusion was devised and tested for the Netherlands, making use of a dedicated dataset. In this study, the measuring instrument has been extended to EU member states, performing secondary analyses of various surveys

Unemployed Youth: A Lost Generation?

Based on a two-wave panel survey (1984 and 1986) of Dutch unemployed youngsters, we addressed the following questions: Do value orientations and well-being change with the duration of unemployment? Which characteristics determine the length of the unemployment spell? We found that there is hardly any change in value orientations; that there is a change in well-being at the beginning of the unemployment period and just a little deterioration after that. With regard to the second question the results of the duration analyses showed that there is a great effect of the unemployment duration on re-employment probability. Education is another important factor. Interpreting these findings it should be kept in mind, however, that only 30 per cent of the unemployed youngsters had found a stable job after two years. About 35 per cent had a career pattern characterised by temporary jobs