Population Aging and Life-Course Flexibility

Publications Working Paper Series Events

Aging populations pose a central policy challenge in all developed countries. While perhaps not pointing to the crisis forecast at one time, the figures associated with the wide scale retirement of the baby-boom generation are still very large.

Fiscal pressures related to aging populations will be increasing at the same time as are demands for more meaningful choice in how work, learning, care giving, and leisure are distributed over adult life. However, other things being equal, more time spent in learning or care-giving in mid-career would reduce the total amount of time spent in work over the course of life. Such a reduction would be unwise given the coming pressures of population aging. Later retirement, however, holds the potential for both eliminating the negative economic effects of aging and increasing choice in work-life balance throughout the course of life.

The Population Aging and Life-Course Flexibility project centered on how policy might simultaneously address the problem of labour force reduction associated with the coming growth in retirement numbers, and, at the same time, allow people more choice in how they allocate work and other activities over the course of their lives.

The PRI interdepartmental exercise began in January 2003 and broke new ground by using a powerful combination of macroeconomic and micro-simulation models to study the macroeconomic, labour market, fiscal and social effects of a variety of scenarios on how people could allocate time to work and other activities over the course of life. This work, in turn, was used in estimating the extent to which market forces are likely to lead to these scenarios, and determining the need for policy change.

For more information on this project, please click here.