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Towards More Inclusive Ageing and Employment Policies: The Lessons from France, The Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland

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Abstract

Many countries have carried out over the past decade a series of reforms and measures to encourage longer working lives and to respond to the looming challenges of rapid population ageing. But have these steps gone far enough and have the necessary measures been taken? Much of the focus of this policy action has been on old-age pension reform but, as stressed in the report Live Longer, Work Longer (OECD 2006), a more comprehensive set of reform may be necessary to encourage work at an older age. This includes policy action in three broad areas to: (1) reward work, (2) change employer practices, and (3) improve the employability of workers. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of recent policy initiatives to give older people better work incentives and choices implemented in France, The Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland since 2006 as well as to identify areas where more could be done, covering both supply-side and demand-side aspects.

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Notes

  1. The effective labour force exit age is derived from labour-force survey data. It is calculated as a weighted average of the exit age of each 5-year age cohort, starting with ages 40–44, and using absolute 5-year changes in the labour-force participation rate of each cohort as weights. The 5-year change in participation rates is simply the difference between the rate for each age group (e.g. 55–59) at the beginning of the period minus the rate for the corresponding age group that is 5 years older (e.g. 60–64) at the end of the period.

  2. Switzerland did not participate in PIAAC.

  3. Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States): for further information, see www.oecd.org/els/employment/olderworkers.

  4. As of November 2012, the “long career” provision allowing retirement before the legal pensionable age if the person began work at a young age was extended to workers who had contributed for a time equal to the qualifying period required for the full-rate pension and who had begun to work before the age of 20 (see Box 3.3, OECD 2014b). This provision was introduced by the 2003 pension reform for private-sector employees if the person began work five quarters before age 16 or 17, the 18-year limit being introduced by the 2010 pension reform. The conditions of access to the long-career retirement provision were gradually extended to the pension regimes of the public sector between 2005 and 2008.

  5. Two pension reforms were rejected: by referendum in 2004 and by the Parliament in 2010.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Paris, France

    Anne Sonnet, Hilde Olsen & Thomas Manfredi

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  1. Anne Sonnet
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  2. Hilde Olsen
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  3. Thomas Manfredi
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Correspondence to Anne Sonnet.

Additional information

All work in the Employment Analysis and Policy Division within the OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs. The authors are grateful to Stefano Scarpetta and Mark Keese for their useful comments to this work. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily correspond with the views of the OECD or its member governments.

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Sonnet, A., Olsen, H. & Manfredi, T. Towards More Inclusive Ageing and Employment Policies: The Lessons from France, The Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland. De Economist 162, 315–339 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-014-9240-x

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