The first round of auto-enrolment into a workplace pension starts today. First proposed by the 2005 Turner Commission report, auto enrolment is intended to help the half of employees who have no supplementary pension to save more for retirement. The rollout has attracted considerable media attention, much of it concentrating upon whether small savers will really benefit and how far the government is prepared to go with its proposal to develop a basic pension that is sufficiently high that such small savings are not means-tested away. IER’s Bernard Casey has recently published a paper on this subject - Voluntary Pension Saving for Old Age: Are the Objectives of Self-responsibility and Security Compatible?. The paper drew comparisons with Germany where policymakers are facing similar challenges (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9515.2012.00853.x/abstract - full content only available to subscribers).

Bernard Casey is Chairing a session at a joint European Commission - World Bank Conference on Reforming Pension Systems in Europe and Central Asia, taking place in Brussels on 25-26 June 2012.

The conference aims to promote an open discussion about the challenges facing pension systems and the potential social, fiscal, financial, and macroeconomic implications of various reform measures to face the demographic challenges. It seeks to initiate and facilitate dialogue among governments and other interested parties on these important issues.

Bernard will chair the session on "Achievements of Pension Reform in the Last 20 Years".

Bernard Casey made presentations at two recent events on issues relating to the employment of older people.

The first, entitled “The Employment of Older People in a Period of Stagnation and Deregulation” was prepared together with Atsuhiro Yamada from the Department of Economics at Keio University, and delivered at the latest ESRC Rethinking Retirement Seminar Series (University of Kent, 4 May). The presentation focused on older people’s employment in Japan over the past twenty years, looking at changing economic circumstances since the end of the bubble economy and the coming to retirement age of the post war baby-boomers. A copy of the presentation can be downloaded from here.

The second was a presentation on “Working Beyond Retirement: explaining a UK phenomenon” at the 7^th European Conference of the European Social Insurance Platform (Brussels, 23 May). Under the title "Active and Healthy Ageing and Solidarity between Generations - the role of social insurances", the event aimed to clarify the role of the social insurance in addressing the challenges and opportunities of societal ageing. Copies of the slides can be downloaded from here.

Population ageing and pressures on public finances have resulted in government pressing the extension of working lives. The economic crisis has meant that some people feel they cannot afford to retire but also that many employers are cutting back on their workforces. Bernard Casey will be giving a seminar on Wednesday 18 May 2011 as part of the University of Warwick Festival of Social Sciences in which he will provide insights into current research on issues relating to post-retirement-age working.

Bernard Casey is a Principal Research Fellow in IER who works on the economic implications of societal ageing. He has been a senior economist at the OECD and is currently a consultant to the European Commission with respect to its proposed Year of Active Ageing. With Professor Noel Whiteside from the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, he authored an article for Parliamentary Brief (May 2011) entitled “The pensions web which Mr Webb has to unweave”.

Bernard Casey, from the Institute of Employment Research, will be presenting on ‘Active Ageing and Employment in Later Life’ at the Demography Network of the European Observatory on the Social Situation and Demography workshop in Brussels on 23 February.  He will be focusing on retirement ages, early retirement, later retirement and length of working life including fiscal consequences of working longer.