Retirement and the Poverty of the Elderly in Portugal (original) (raw)

The effect of retirement on economic welfare, indirectly measured by income, has not been studied widely, namely due to the lack of longitudinal data. A large literature exists about poverty in old age, mainly based on cross sectional survey data, but usually those studies are not able to study the transitional effect of retirement on income as they do not observe the workers who do retire before and after their retirement. The knowledge of this phenomenon is, however, of crucial relevance given the growing number of elderly people, the trend towards earlier retirement, and continuing relatively high poverty rates among the elderly.