Bernhard Ebbinghaus: Reforming Early Retirement in Europe, Japan and the USA.

Abstract

Comparing eight European countries, Japan and the United States, Reforming Early Retirement has a number of aims. One is to illustrate the differences in the development and scale of early retirement across countries and time. The other is to analyse the push and pull factors which influence early retirement, thereby increasing our understanding of the development of the different regimes of early retirement around the globe with a view to understanding why reversing the trend of early retirement is difficult. With an increasing focus on the globalization of ageing and the efforts of governments to discourage early retirement, the book is an important and interesting contribution to our understanding of the factors driving early retirement in different welfare regimes and thus the factors that conceivably could reverse the trend of the last 30–40 years. The book will inform policy analysts and policy makers as well as academics and others interested in late life work and retirement in an ageing world.