Abstract
AbstractSince the 2000s, migration within and into the European Economic Area (EEA) has increased significantly. Some migrants will retire in their destination countries. This makes questions about their retirement protection increasingly relevant for social policy. To address this, we examine past experience. Using the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we compared the pensions of post-1945 migrants, who settled in their host country, with non-migrants. We considered migrants who moved into and within the EEA, from poorer and richer countries. Where pensions were lower we sought to explain this in relation to the migration literature. As expected, we found some evidence that migrants’ pensions were lower, although significant variations were observed between EEA migrants and non-EEA migrants. However, surprisingly there were few indications that migrant pensions were lower because migrants as a whole were disadvantaged through late labour market entry or employment discrimination. Instead educational disadvantage mattered most, particularly for the highly educated: all highly educated migrants received lower rewards for their human capital than comparable non-migrants. Migrants who settled in countries with less-protective pension systems were also disadvantaged. Making retirement outcomes for migrants more equal would, thus, mean improving career opportunities for highly educated migrants and steps towards more-inclusive pension systems everywhere.
Highlights
Increased migration within and into the European Economic Area (EEA) during the last decade has focused academic and political attention on migrants’ socialDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core
This study compared the public pensions of migrants into and within the EEA who retired there with non-migrants
We explored the assumption that migrants were automatically disadvantaged by late entry into their host country due to the delay this causes in building entitlements
Summary
Increased migration within and into the European Economic Area (EEA) during the last decade has focused academic and political attention on migrants’ social. These were divided further, by wealth: North EEA, South EEA, low GDP non-EEA and high GDP non-EEA (for further discussion, see the Descriptive statistics section) These divisions were based on related research, which found migrants’ pensions affected by wealth of country of origin, wage levels compared to the host country, by host country welfare institutions and by their interaction (Meyer et al, 2012; Bridgen and Meyer, 2019). We examined differences between the migrant groups only: the fourth regression compared EEA with non-EEA migrants, and the fifth regression divided migrants by North/South EEA and low/high GDP non-EEA to investigate potential disadvantages between richer and poorer countries In these migrant-only analyses, we used the same control variables (age at interview, sex, marital status and household income) as in the first three analyses, and controlled for additional migrantspecific pension-relevant factors: migrants who moved more than once, age on migration, decade of migration and acquisition of citizenship. Across all migrant sub-groups, the 1960s was the modal decade for migration
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