Welfare Reform on the Web (June 2008): Pensions - overseas

Do adult children matter?: the effects of National Health Insurance on retirement behavior: evidence from Taiwan

H.-L. Hsieh

Contemporary Economic Policy, vol. 26, 2008, p. 317-334

This paper examines the effect of National Health Insurance, implemented in 1995, on retirement behaviour in Taiwan. Taking advantage of the longitudinal structure of the Survey of Health and Living Status of the Middle Aged and Elderly, the study built a duration dataset to investigate how prospective retirees with varying numbers of adult children responded to NHI. The evidence suggests that NHI raised the conditional probability that a male worker in the private sector over the age of 51 would retire by more than 60%. However, the impact of NHI is significantly less on men with a traditional safety net in the shape of adult sons.

Public pension provision: a comparison of the British and Japanese systems, based on their university arrangements

A. El-Agraa

Pensions: an International Journal, vol. 13, p. 25-48

This article compares pension provision for British and Japanese academics and finds that Japanese academics fare less well than their British counterparts in almost all aspects of the provision for their retirement. The findings, the author argues, can be used to make broader comparisons between the British and Japanese public pension systems.

Strikes over pension reforms grip France

A. Chrisafis

The Guardian, May 23rd 2008, p. 30

Hundreds of thousands of French workers have taken part in a one day strike over the raising of the retirement age. France's five main unions protested against plans to make employees work for 41 years as opposed to 40 years before being eligible to draw a full pension.