Journal of the Economics of Ageing最新文献

I investigate the links between the part-time employment opportunities and the labour supply adjustments of older workers, focusing on both the extensive and intensive margins. Utilising data for 30 European countries in the period from 2011 to 2021, I construct a quasi-panel that compares individuals aged 60–64 with those aged 55–59 from five years prior. I find that the employees in sectors offering more part-time jobs are more likely to stay in employment, and that the total hours worked by these employees decrease at a slower rate than those of the employees in sectors imposing more rigid hours constraints. These results are most pronounced for women in manual types of occupation, but are significant across almost all examined worker categories. The positive relationship between the part-time employment opportunities and the total hours worked of older employees is robust to various modifications in the empirical setup. However, this relationship is heterogeneous across countries, and is least pronounced in the countries with a high availability of part-time jobs.

The intergenerational transfer of resources is gaining importance across countries facing population ageing. This paper investigates the economic and budgetary consequences of ageing in the Slovak Republic, which is projected to be one of the fastest ageing polities of the European Union. Using dependency and support indicators derived from the National Transfer Accounts, the quantitative analysis shows how this demographic development impacts aggregate labour income, consumption, taxes and public and private transfers. For instance, the transfer weighted public sector dependency ratio increases by 117 %, from 1.12 in 2015 to 2.43 in 2060. While increasing the retirement age may dampen the negative economic effect of demographic ageing, it cannot resolve the ensuing imbalance in labour income and consumption on its own. Moreover, the potential positive effect of higher fertility is preceded by an increase in consumption by the economically inactive Youth, which results in a deteriorating balance of private transfers. This trade-off is often overlooked in the scholarly debate. A combination of measures composed of increased labour productivity and lower consumption appears the most likely solution to the problem of growing imbalance between aggregate labour income and consumption.

This paper uses long-term population projections to study the evolution of dementia in Luxembourg through 2070, as well as its impact on public expenditure through healthcare and long-term care. We extend a standard micro-simulation model on health outcomes by adding an algorithm to identify individuals suffering from dementia. This allows us to simulate dementia prevalence among individuals aged 50 and more in several scenarios incorporating alternative hypotheses about risk factors, new treatments and comorbidities (including long-run effects of COVID-19). Public health policies reducing stroke and hypertension risk could lower dementia prevalence by 17% and public expenditure on healthcare for dementia patients by a similar amount. A new treatment extending the mild dementia phase could nearly double prevalence and possibly triple the associated healthcare costs. Finally, past exposure to COVID-19 could raise prevalence by 12% to 24% in the medium term and public expenditure on dementia healthcare by 6% to 12%. Public expenditure on long-term care for dementia patients would increase even more, generally doubling by 2070.

This paper investigates how crossing the normal pension eligibility age affects retirement status and healthcare utilization by using the exogenous rule for the public pension benefit and a dataset for the elderly population from South Korea — one of the high-income Asian countries. To overcome selection bias, I rely on a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to compare the outcomes of those barely above and below eligibility age thresholds. By using aggregate measures of healthcare utilization, I find that retirement increases inpatient care utilization, while it has a negative but statistically insignificant effect on outpatient care utilization. These results are qualitatively consistent with the existing evidence in the developing country documenting that retirement positively impacts inpatient care utilization.

This paper develops an overlapping generations model with intergenerational transfer of time in the form of grandparenting and pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system. The introduction of time transfer allows taking into account child care responsibilities. Under the situation of population ageing, a fall in the fertility rate leads to not only a reduction in contributions to the pension system but also lower childcare responsibilities that increase life-cycle income. Hence, the impacts of demographic changes on old labour decisions and pensions need to be re-examined. I find that in countries with low fertility rates and small pension systems, a fall in fertility rate reduces working time in old age. Consequently, population ageing due to a lower fertility rate always decreases pensions. On the other hand, for countries with high fertility rates and countries with low fertility rates but large pension systems, a decrease in fertility rate reduces retirement age. In these countries, pensions will increase if retirement is elastic to changes in fertility. In all cases, longer life expectancy increases pensions if retirement is relatively inelastic to changes in longevity.

Singapore had experienced rapid GDP growth from the period of 1970-2020. This work is adds to the overall contribution in studies understanding the contribution of age and education effects in the demographic dividend for countries, in this case – for a small, rapidly-developing country in Asia that had achieved high-income status. Following Rentería et. al. (2016), we use the Das Gupta decomposition technique to decompose Singapore’s demographic dividend to the respective age effect and education effect. We do this, having derived labour income and consumption profiles by age and education attainment, using National Transfer Account (NTA) methodology. We find that for Singapore the education effect was larger than the age effect for the entire period, driven by the education effect on labour income. These findings are comparable to Rentería et. al. (2016) for Mexico and Spain where the education effect were also larger than the age effect. Understanding the contributions of age and education effects on the economic support ratio will have policy implications as Singapore continues to age rapidly. This work also adds to the perspective on the importance of building up human capital in sustaining the demographic dividend.

Israel’s rapidly growing population comprises three major groups: Israeli Arabs; Haredim, also known as ultraorthodox Jews; and the general population, mainly composed of secular and religious Jews. Each of these has a different demographic and socioeconomic profile, including very different age structures and anticipated growth patterns. Here, we disaggregate Israel’s 2018 national NTA schedule for each of the three subpopulations. We show that as of 2018, collected tax income fell short of public expenditures by 4.9% in the general population, 56.2% in the Arab population, and 66.1% in the Haredi population. The Haredi population was almost fully reliant on public transfers to make up this difference. The low fiscal support ratios (FSRs) in Israel’s Arab and Haredi populations are a direct result of their low employment levels and low-quality employment. We forecast the fiscal consequences of two type of compositional shifts within Israel’s population up to 2050: aging and a rapid increase in the share of Haredi Jews at all ages. These forecasts point to a 12% reduction in Israel’s national fiscal support ratio by 2050, with two-thirds of this caused by aging, and the remainder by the increasing share of Haredim.

We investigate the potential dynamics in the effect of retirement, on food-at-home purchases and dietary quality in Denmark. We combine Home-scan data with nutritional information and administrative data on retirement, income and health status. The panel contains 497 retiring and 1,471 control households. We estimate the effect of retirement up to 10 years after the date of retirement by using Fixed Effects with health and wealth proxies, as well as Fixed Effects IV with the ages eligible for retirement as instruments to control for the potential endogeneity of retirement. Based on the Fixed effects results we find that overall dietary quality increase slightly at retirement, but find only minor and mostly insignificant changes in the individual components of the diet. The effects are found to be of the same magnitude, but insignificant in the FE-IV estimation. Hence, there seem to be a small increase in dietary health upon retirement in Denmark. The results for food expenditure and energy consumption are ambiguous. Based on the FE with proxy variables we find indications of long-run adjustments in food expenditures, while energy consumption is immediately affected by retirement, but has no further adjustment. Both effects are insignificant in the FE-IV estimation. The very small changes observed, suggest that dietary behaviour might be governed by habitual behaviour and might also be due to the high income replacement rate at retirement in Denmark.

The global shifts in population age distribution brings about both challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, demographic transitions present an opportunity for sustained economic growth. However, it also poses challenges in meeting future consumption requirements. In this paper, we performed an index decomposition analysis linked with an economic-demographic model to trace how population age structure change may affect household electricity demand with the Philippines as a specific case study. Our results show that population ageing has a direct, significant, and persistent effect on residential electricity demand growth. In economies like the Philippines where the elderly consumes more electricity per person relative to younger cohorts, population ageing is expected to raise aggregate electricity demand through sheer compositional accounting effect. But even in economies where average electricity consumption is flat or declining in age, demographic dividends are projected to raise aggregate electricity consumption by expanding electricity access and increasing usage intensity across all age groups through a positive income effect. The permanence and irreversibility of population ageing, and the persistence of economic growth from demographic change may drive continuing growth in the energy sector.

Population aging increases dependency levels and can influence the transition from working life to retirement. Changes in population structure have important economic effects, which can be positive when analyzing the impacts of a more educated older labor force but could also impact families and governments. It is important to consider how age and education composition are associated with each other in contexts marked by high levels of inequality. In this paper, we analyze the economic consequences of the aging process in Brazil considering the role of improvements in education and the possibility of the constitution of a silver dividend in the country. We use a series of simulation models, based on the determinants of labor supply and labor income of people aged 45 years and over, to investigate the impacts of changes in the educational composition of the labor force. Our simulations show that the positive association between education, labor supply, and labor income would be more pronounced in scenarios of higher levels of education, labor market stability (high status activities and informality reduction), and changes in retirement rules, specifically the establishment of minimum ages. Such a context would increase the number of older workers and improve productivity, allowing appropriate conditions for the development of a silver dividend in Brazil in a quantitative and a qualitative way.