Does Mobility Matter? Income Inequality after Retirement

Diana López-Falcón , Munich Center for the Economics of Aging
Yuri Pettinicchi, Munich Center for the Economics of Aging, Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy

According to “The 2018 Pension Adequacy Report” (European Commission 2018), about 18.2 percent of people aged 65 and older in the EU remain at risk of poverty or social exclusion. However, little is said about the living conditions and the higher risk of poverty or social exclusion that former mobile workers face at older ages - particularly after reaching the statutory retirement age at destination countries - given their discontinuous working and contribution histories. We provide empirical evidence about the impact of mobility at working ages in the living conditions and risk of exclusion of older people in Europe. By working with retrospective data of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) we can have a look at the life histories of more than 65,000 individuals aged 50+ across Europe and gain from understanding mobility and settlement patterns of previous intra-EU migrants. For the analysis of the current living conditions of the respondents, we follow two different approaches. First, we include the self-reported financial distress as a subjective measure. Second, we estimate income-based –and therefore, objective- measures. Through the At-Risk-Of-Poverty (AROP) rates we can observe the share of people with an Equivalized Disposable Income (after social transfers) below the at-risk-of-poverty threshold.

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 Presented in Session P2. Poster Session Ageing, Health and Mortality