ANALYSIS OF ELDERLY FINANCIAL STABILITY IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES – CLASSIFICATION APPROACH

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to analyze and compare the financial situation of elderly people in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. The above countries have gone through similar transformation path to market economy in their socio-economic development and they have been faced similar demographic and economic problems. The financial situation of elderly people in CEE region has been strongly influenced by demographic trends, changes in macroeconomic situation and reforms of existing pension systems. Increasing lifetime, low replacement rate from the public pension systems and little pension savings or even a lack of them cause that increasing number of elderly people can be exposed to financial instability or even poverty risk. Consequently, the examination of the financial standing of the elderly in CEE region seems to be an important scientific and practical issue.In the analysis, six variables measuring the level of income and expenses, exposure to poverty risk as well as gender differences in disposable income for age group of 65 years or over were included. The data characterizing the financial situation of elderly people in eleven CEE countries was acquired from Eurostat database. The authors applied Ward’s method and the k-means method in order to classify the examined countries according to the financial standing of elderly people. The obtained results allow to indicate countries with similar financial situation of elderly people in 2007, 2010 and 2014 as well as changes in clusters over the analyzed period. Moreover, the variance analysis was applied to indicate the influence of particular variables on the clustering results. The main findings show that the financial situation of the elderly in CEE countries is very differentiated and changeable, however over the analyzed period financial standing of the elderly seems to be the most similar in Hungary, Poland and Slovenia.