Effective Age of Retirement: Innovative Methodology and Recent Experience

Innovative ways to estimate retirement age make it possible to assess better effective retirement from employment and not only to focus on labor force participation rates. This makes it also possible to distinguish better between retirement from full-time employment and part-time employment. It is found that average effective retirement age is indeed lower when only considering retirement from full-time employment rather than considering jointly retirement from both full-time and part-time employment. The emerging trend towards an increase in effective retirement age is not simply the fact of a gradual retirement, but also encompasses retirement from full-time employment. Results for four countries (Austria and Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom) reveal diverging experiences.