Actual age of exit and expected retirement age of the Spanish adult population

Madelín Gómez León, University of Southampton

The approach to retirement ages of the baby boom cohort causes great uncertainty about the economic sustainability of the pension systems and the European Welfare System. Being one of the oldest populations in Europe, Spain exhibits as well as most of the European countries a transition towards early exits from the labour market of adult population at ages increasingly lower. The research addresses this phenomenon attending to the relationship between ageing and labour force participation. Thus, the general objective is: To describe trends in actual and expected exits from the labour market towards permanent labour inactivity of adults in Spain. From a demographic approach, the thesis focuses on the analysis of the age at which this event takes place using a cross-sectional perspective. To describe the behaviour of employment and exits of adult population the Spanish Labour Force Survey (LFS) is used. This research identified elements that could be taken into account in the formulation of labour policies. Two elements stand out among them, the first refers to the significant potential of older adults under age 65, and who are not employed because they have gone under early retirement, or are seeking a new employment. Thus, the demographic component indicates that there is an available demographic potential which is not properly exploited. The other element is that some of these older adults who are already out of the labour market would have prolonged their working life, even beyond the retirement mean age observed today, if labour conditions had been different.