Abstract
The fast population ageing has generated and will continue to generate large social, economic and health challenges in the 21th century in Australia, and many other developed and developing countries. Population ageing is projected to lead to workforce shortages, welfare dependency, fiscal unsustainability, and a higher burden of chronic diseases on health care system. Promoting health and sustainable work capacity among mature age and older workers hence becomes the most important and critical way to address all these challenges. This paper used the pooled data from the longitudinal Household, Incomes and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey 2002–2011 data to investigate common and different factors predicting voluntary or involuntary workforce transitions among workers aged 45 to 64. Long term health conditions and preference to work less hours increased while having a working partner and proportion of paid years decreased both voluntary and involuntary work force transitions. Besides these four common factors, the voluntary and involuntary workforce transitions had very different underlying mechanisms. Our findings suggest that government policies aimed at promoting workforce participation at later life should be directed specifically to life-long health promotion and continuous employment as well as different factors driving voluntary and involuntary workforce transitions, such as life-long training, healthy lifestyles, work flexibility, ageing friendly workplace, and job security.
Highlights
The Australian population is ageing fast, with a predicted increase in the old age dependency ratio from 21 per cent in 2011 to 38–42 per cent in 2050 [1]
The estimated coefficients and significant levels of all predictors from the three models are reported in Table 3 for comparison
On the labour force supply side, our analysis shows that the current generation of mature age workers are baby boomers who are still working under the male breadwinner female caregiver model, pursuing the norm of “good jobs” as secure and full time jobs, working as long as possible except for married females who participated in labour force flexibly to balance work and care needs [29,49,55,56,57]
Summary
The Australian population is ageing fast, with a predicted increase in the old age dependency ratio (the ratio of older people aged 65 years and over to the working age population aged 15–64 years) from 21 per cent in 2011 to 38–42 per cent in 2050 [1]. The rapid population ageing in Australia will lead to shortages of labour force as well as increases in government expenditure on age pensions, health and aged care services, as stated in the Australian Government’s Intergenerational Report 2010 [2,3]. Maintaining labour force participation at mature ages is considered to be the most constructive strategy for addressing all the challenges of an ageing society as working longer can increase productivity and tax revenue, and assist individuals to build resources for their own retirement income as well as reduce the government’s potential liability [2,4]. Public Health 2019, 16, 3769; doi:10.3390/ijerph16193769 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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