A framework for studying the retirement process in Europe

Population ageing will shape ‘the Europe’ to come and its political agenda. In less than fifty years, older people in Europe will have doubled in relation to people in working age, and are expected to reach 30% of the population (United Nations, 2013). This previous trend questions the longterm sustainability of the European pension systems. To ensure their sustainability, among other measures, governments have continued the reforms started in the mid-1990s (Börsch-Supan et al., 2009). Some of these reforms have been focused on increasing the reliance on individual private savings (Rey et al., 2015). However, European citizens are far from being ‘homogenous individuals’. Therefore, the ‘one size fits all’ policies that have characterized European strategy in last years could have quite different effects on retirees’ economics well-being depending on differences in individuals’ health, wealth or other social features. To foresee the potential effects of these policies on retirement well-being, it is necessary to achieve a better scientific understanding of complex interactions between health, economic and social factors (Börsch-Supan et al., 2005; Jürges, 2009). Over the last decade, academic researchers and public decisionmakers have coped with these challenges by starting to create a crossnationally comparable microdata infrastructure that helps researchers to better understand the individual and population ageing processes. The objective of this chapter is not only to document the characteristics of the existing European datasets containing household and individual-level information on retirement well-being, but also to discuss potential strategies for researching the interactions between individuals’ financial decisions and other issues in European countries.