Shall I stay or shall I go? Late graduation and retirement decision
Early retirement from regular employment provides a major challenge to social and health policies in Europe. “As people older than 60 will comprise close to one third of the population in several European countries over the next two decades, a shrinking number of economically active people will have to support a growing number of economically dependent elderly people” (SHARE, 2009, p.5). There is, therefore, a political focus on the need to maintain workers longer in employment. An example of this European endeavour is the declaration by the European Council (Stockholm, March 2001) that claimed that by 2010 at least half of the EU population aged between 55 and 64 shall be in employment.
The benchmark indicator on the employment rate of the 55-64 years oldreveals an improvement over the period 2004-2006, moving from 41% at the EU 27 average level to 53%. The gap in employment rate between the 25-54 years old and the 55-64 years old during that period decreased from 47% to 34%. By 2010, while the employment rate of the 55-64 years old had dropped back to 48% (mainly as a result of the economic crisis), the gap with the younger cohort remained stable at 34%. The reduction in the gaps across age cohorts observed since 2004 may be interpreted as a signal of a non-discriminatory EU labour market. Still, this result at the EU27 average level hides strong country variations, with countries, such as the NL and IE, having increased significantly the size of the gap between these two age cohorts over the period 2004-2010.
Hence, although the presence of such an age gap does not constitute in itself an evidence of a potential age-based discrimination practice on European labour markets, it is clear from Figure 1 that senior workers are significantly less likely to be employed than their younger peers in all EU Member States.