Introduction: Policy Responses to Ageing and the Extension of Working Lives

Abstract

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the relationship between work and ageing has become increasingly visible as a policy issue. It is both reflected in and influenced by changes in macro-economic policy, life-opportunities and social attitudes associated with growing older, as a combination of falling birth rates and increased longevity, and has put pressure on the traditional parameters of the working age. The idea of retiring at a fixed point in the life-course, to enjoy a period of rest or leisure at the end of a working life, emerged in many advanced economies during the 1900s and evolved into policies that encouraged early retirement as the baby-boomers entered the jobs mar..