reforming early retirement in europe japan and the sep 2006

[...]... though early retirement was more common among women, especially in Denmark and Britain In contrast to the Anglophone cases, the Scandinavian welfare states (Denmark and Sweden) saw further increases in early exit in the 1990s Japan stands out with the slowest growth and the lowest overall level but with a recent upward trend More detailed cross-national and longitudinal analysis of the macro-indicators... seem particularly high in the case of early retirement Governments were rather slow in realizing the direct and indirect costs of early exit and in taking appropriate action once they recognized its scope Often, they were afraid of negative consequences for already aggravated labor markets Furthermore, the social partners have considerable vested interests in maintaining early retirement Although trade... facilitating and using early exit from work, advancing their interests Because of its considerable consequences for individual life courses, labor markets, and welfare states, early retirement has become a pressing Introduction policy issue and the subject of considerable debate in public and academic circles In addition to declines in average retirement age, all modern industrialized societies are aging... which institutional conditions are the social partners more likely to impede or facilitate a policy reversal? In this book, I unravel the roles the social partners play in bringing about the widespread practice of early exit from work and their involvement in the current reform process to reverse this trend By analyzing the social partners, I complement and integrate in this study the two dominant... of their production system, employers, workers, and their representatives develop their own strategies in drawing on available opportunities for early retirement that are provided by the public protection system and are often supplemented by the social partners The shared expectations and social norms held by the social actors themselves are crucial in explaining the self-reinforcing process of early. .. Ebbinghaus and Visser 1997) These delineate three different management–labor modes: (a) voluntarist (or ‘give -and- take’) bargaining traditions in Anglophone labor relations, (b) contentious labor relations in Latin Europe, and (c) cooperative labor relations in the remaining countries There is no clear one-on-one relationship between these institutional configurations; nevertheless, there are some intriguing... 1990), the intra-regime comparison enables analysis of the opportunities for policy reform and institutional change within similar regime configurations However, since there are fewer cases than possible regime combinations, I complement the macro-regime comparison with more detailed historical institutional analysis of the pull and push factors and the role of social partners in fostering, maintaining, and. .. assumes that incentives determine the decision of older workers to retire, while the labor demand perspective perceives early exit as the outcome of firms’ human resource strategies In this study, I maintain that the social partners play a crucial mediating role between such push and pull factors Protection systems provide the pathways and the incentives for early retirement; the production systems induce... need to explain the general trends of early exit, and the timing in particular When did early exit from work take off and what are the forces that led to its expansion and fluctuation? In particular, why did the trend toward early retirement more or less universally accelerate during the late 1970s and early 1980s? Moreover, we need to account for substantial cross-national differences in exit trajectories... higher rates of early retirement than others? For instance, why do we find lower exit rates among older workers in Japan, Scandinavia, and Anglophone societies, while on average their counterparts in Continental European welfare states tend to leave work earlier and in larger numbers? In this study, I explain these significantly different trajectories of early exit from work by cross-national institutional . w0 h0" alt="" Reforming Early Retirement in Europe, Japan and the USA This page intentionally left blank Reforming Early Retirement in Europe, Japan and the USA Bernhard Ebbinghaus 1 3 Great. University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Bernhard Ebbinghaus, 2006 The moral rights of the authors have. labor and the state: Extending social rights 39 2.2.2 Organized labor and the state: Reducing labor supply 41 2.2.3 Employers and the state: Buying social peace 43 2.2.4 Employers and the state: