What drives older adults to continue working after official retirement age?

Abstract

The need to ensure the economic wellbeing and quality of life of those who reach the official retirement age is a matter of concern in the world of social services and in social policy making. Since some working older adults may be forced to retire when they reach the official retirement age while others retire voluntarily, the study is based on a dedicated survey among 508 persons who retired both willingly and unwillingly for good after reaching the official retirement age and 437 persons who continued working uninterruptedly. The findings show that the odds of staying on the job after retirement age are contingent on the socio-demographic and health-related characteristics of the older adult. Furthermore, the economic predictors of remaining in the labour force after retirement age depend on how strongly the older adult wishes to retire. Those who continue working after retirement age and those who retire willingly are undifferentiated in the level of financial support that they give others. Comparing older adults who continue working uninterruptedly with those who retire unwillingly, the chances of being among the former are higher among those who are better off before reaching retirement age. These results emphasise the need to extend welfare and financial-support policies to older adults who are forced to retire, in order to minimise the economic blow that this path to retirement causes.

Investigating the Factors That Influence Early Retirement of Private Sector Workers in the Center Region of Cameroon

“…In most countries, the state pension schemes specify an official retirement age which has been raised by many countries in recent years, especially due to longer life expectancies. Many such schemes also include a much earlier age of early retirement eligibility e.g., in Italy, Belgium, Netherlands (Tur-Sinai et al, 2022). However, in many countries the labor force is occupied to a great extent by elderly workers, who create a downward trend in productivity, while some younger workers desire an early retirement from the work force.…”

Adaptation to life after sport for retired athletes: A scoping review of existing reviews and programs

“…Several approaches can be used to examine individuals' retirement experiences, including approaches from the field of social gerontology where retirement is seen as a career transition that results in the termination of paid work [24][25][26], and a shift to a new career after a long period of employment in a different field [27][28][29]. Other theoretical work sees retirement as a transitional process [30][31][32] or even an event that occurs through several stages [33,34] In sport science, athletic retirement has been conceptualized in a way that emphasizes emotional and social well-being [35][36][37], as well as non-athletic career planning [14,38].…”