Active ageing. Early retirement and employability

The articles in this report all deal with the Tranitional Labour Market perspective and examine participation patterns, early retirement schemes for older workers, and the activation capabilities of specific policy reforms. Different policies and policy mixes are analysed and various welfare arrangements in member states are compared, while recognising path dependencies. The basic assumption is the generally low employment rate of older people in the countries observed and a central goal is to analyse the determinants of limited participation or early exit behaviour. Referring to the TLM-approach, additional attention is paid to the impact of policy reforms, policy recommendations concerning early exit and the lengthening of working life, and social risk management within the context of active ageing. We hope that this report will contribute to the policy debate on the modernisation of the EU social model.

The contributions in this report have been discussed during seminars and conferences regarding active ageing, and were organised within the context of the European TLM.NET thematic network ‘Managing Social Risks through Transitional Labour Markets’, founded by the fifth framework programme of the European Commission and managed by the Wissenschaftszentrum für Sozialforschung, Berlin and SISWO, Social Policy Research, Amsterdam.

We start with the general, comparative contributions in which national regimes, policies on seniors, and recent activation reforms are analysed and compared. This macro level analysis is then complemented in the second part of this special issue with analyses of individual countries and studies that focus on the company level (micro level).