engleski

Early Retirement Intentions in Croatia, Poland and Slovenia

According to the Eurobarometer, in 2001 almost 70% of European citizens disagreed with the statement that the age of retirement should be raised so that people work longer and spend less time in retirement. At the same time, the 2001 Stockholm European Council set a target of raising the average EU employment rate for older men and women (aged 55–64) to 50% by 2010. This goal was for the EU countries average achieved three years later than planned, but as reported by the Eurostat, six EU countries have not reached this target by the end of 2019: Croatia, Greece, Luxembourg, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia. In this paper we focus on Croatia, Poland and Slovenia because they are all Central and Eastern European emerging economies that have had trade union initiatives against raising the retirement age. In 2019, trade unions in Croatia collected enough citizens’ signatures for a referendum to prevent the gradual extension of the retirement age for both genders to 67 by 2033, and stronger penalisation of early retirement. The referendum was not organised since the Croatian government changed the Pension Insurance Act according to the unions’ demands. In Poland, trade unions proposed in 2012 a national referendum and protests were organised since the government had introduced a phased increase of the retirement age to 67 years by 2020 for men and by 2040 for women. The Polish government restored the lower retirement age in 2017: 65 for men and 60 for women. Finally, in 2011 Slovenian citizens on a referendum rejected the implementation of pension reform which would gradually raise the retirement age for both genders at 65 years. The goal of our paper is to analyse predictors of early retirement intentions among older employees (between 50 years of age and statutory retirement age) by using the SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement) micro data. We take into account socio-demographic, health, well-being, financial and work related variables and estimate logit regression models. We aim to discover how countries that are economically diverse, but institutionally similar, differ in early retirement intentions, and propose country- specific measures to raise the employment rate of older workers.

early retirement ; employment ; SHARE ; Croatia ; Poland ; Slovenia

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