Since the concept of retirement is prominent in both popular thinking and academic studies it would be helpful if the notion were analytically sound, could be measured with precision, and would make possible comparisons of patterns of retirement over time and among different populations. This paper reviews and assesses the many concepts and measures that have been proposed, summarizing them in groupings that reflect non-participation or reduced participation in the labour force, receipt of pension income, end-of-career employment, selfassessed retirement, or combinations of those characteristics. It concludes that there is no agreed measure and that no one measure dominates. Instead, new measures continue to be proposed to take account of additional refinements as new data sets become available, thereby further restricting possible comparisons. The confusing array of definitions reflects the practical problem that underlies the concept of retirement: it is an essentially negative notion, a notion of what people are not doing -namely, that they are not working. A more positive approach would be to focus instead on what people are doing, including especially their involvement in non-market activities that are socially productive, even if those activities do not contribute to national income as conventionally measured.Key Words: concepts of retirement, measures of retirement JEL Classification: J26 Résumé:Puisque que la notion de retraite est à la mode dans la pensée populaire et dans les études académiques, il serait utile de définir un concept analytiquement pertinent que l'on puisse mesurer avec précision afin de comparer les tendances à travers le temps et les différents groupes de population. Cet essaie revoit et évalue les différents concepts et mesures qui ont été proposés, en considérant les regroupements reflétant l'absence ou une participation réduite à la population active, les bénéficiaires de prestation de retraite, les emplois de fin de carrière, le statut de retraite auto-évalué, ou d'une combinaison de ces caractéristiques. La conclusion est qu'il n'existe aucun consensus pour aucune de ces mesures. Au contraire, de nouvelles mesures continuent d'être proposées afin de mieux prendre en compte les raffinements du concept mesurables dans les séries de données nouvellement parues, compliquant davantage les comparaisons possibles. Ce large éventail de définitions reflète les problèmes pratiques derrière la notion de retraite: c'est essentiellement un concept qui se définit par la négative, une notion qui regroupe ce que les gens ne font pas -à savoir, qui ne travaille pas. Une approche plus positive viserait à se concentrer sur que les gens font, en particulier sur les activités non marchandes qui sont socialement productives, même si ces dernières ne contribuent pas au revenu national tel qu'il est conventionnellement mesuré.

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The effects of population aging on future health care costs are an important public policy concern in many countries. We focus in this paper on physician services and investigate how changes in the size and age distribution of a population can affect the aggregate and per capita costs of such services. The principal data set (unpublished, for Ontario) provides information about payments to physicians, by age and sex of patients. Using it, we derive age/cost profiles for 19 categories of physicians. Adopting an index-theoretic framework, we then use the profiles to analyse the "pure" effects of population change (historical and projected) on physician costs, and to decompose the effects into population growth effects and population aging effects. We present calculations for Ontario, for the population of 15 industrialized countries, and for four theoretical populations.

C43, C53, J10, Mortality, life expectancy, stochastic forecasting,