An ageing European population and, therefore, a rising dependency ratio of retirees to the working population, strongly suggests that a pension funding gap will be a key social issue in future. Yet many older people have significant real estate assets that they could access using equity release products. They could sell their assets in exchange for lifelong or temporary monthly payments. Equity release products are relatively new to Poland, but are not yet offered by commercial banks in Czechia and Slovakia. This paper estimates the potential benefits of marriage reverse annuity, and reverse mortgage contracts, using the Svensson model function, and empirical property data from selected Czech, Slovak and Polish cities. The results are also compared to the average pension of inhabitants in the selected cities. It is shown that there is substantial scope for boosting retirement income in all the cases considered, though the precise size of the increase depends on factors such as contract buyers' age and life expectancy, the value of their assets, the payment consequences of a spouse's death, and contract suppliers' pricing policies.

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One of the crucial benefits of EU membership, inscribed in Art. 3(3) of the Treaty on the European Union, should be economic and social cohesion. Ample empirical studies have examined EU countries' performance in terms of nominal convergence, real convergence, and convergence of business and financial cycles. Twenty years after the inception of the Economic and Monetary Union, economic cohesion clearly is not a reality, while widening real income gaps threaten social cohesion, too. The paper aims to highlight the heterogeneity and dynamics of changes in economic performance and perceptions of the euro across Europe-two factors arguably having a tremendous impact on the success of the European project. To this end, series of data spanning 2008 through 2017 were explored using hierarchical cluster analysis.