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Pension reforms and healthy ageing in Italy and Europe: quasi-natural experimental analysis of linked health and pension datasets

Project description

How will pension reforms impact healthy ageing?

The COVID-19 crisis, which shined a light on health and the most vulnerable groups, lengthened the list of economies in debt distress. This situation will also influence how pension reforms will impact healthy ageing. The EU-funded PRA project will answer this question and uncover the hidden and unanticipated health consequences of pension reforms and associated inequalities. It will analyse surveys on health, retirement and ageing in 19 EU countries together with specific quasi-natural experiment studies of pension reforms increasing pensionable ages. Moreover, it will create innovative administrative-record linkages in Italian pension and health system data to quantify occupation-specific mortality and unequal survival times.

Objective

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many European countries to spend money that they do not have. This is creating unprecedented levels of debt and will inevitably lead to pressure for retrenchment in social welfare, with pensions seen as a key target. While some nations will seek to protect pensions, others will not. How will these pension reforms impact on healthy ageing? Will such reforms pension save money or perversely pass costs onto healthcare and other welfare systems? We propose an ambitious research programme to inform these critical questions. Our proposed research combines analysis of the Surveys on Health, Retirement and Ageing in Europe (SHARE) in 19 EU countries with specific quasi-natural experiment studies of pension reforms increasing pensionable ages (UK 1995 Pension Act and Italy 2011 Fornero Reform) and reducing pension payments (Netherlands 2013 Pension Reductions and Greece Katrougas Law 2016). Additionally the project will create innovative administrative-record linkages in Italian pension and health system data to quantify occupation-specific mortalities and unequal survival times. Overall, it builds on the PI’s strong track-record in evaluating health impacts of austerity and natural experiment research designs. The anticipated findings will test critical ideas about a ‘health-promoting pension system’ and about which occupational groups may merit additional compensation due to lower survival times. It will help inform critical policy debates by revealing the hidden and unanticipated health consequences of pension reforms and associated inequalities.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

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Host institution

UNIVERSITA COMMERCIALE LUIGI BOCCONI
Net EU contribution
€ 1 880 430,00
Address
VIA SARFATTI 25
20136 Milano
Italy

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Region
Nord-Ovest Lombardia Milano
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 1 880 430,00

Beneficiaries (1)