If Elisabet Wilhelmsson were Italian, statistics suggest she would be in her sixth year of retirement. Instead, the 64-year-old Swede teaches high-school history and religion in the southern town of Lund and has no plans to retire until past her 67th birthday.
“I may reduce my hours, or take a little pause. If I am healthy, I could always come back,” she says. The official retirement age of 65 seems to be of little importance to her.
Mrs Wilhelmsson is no exception in Sweden, where more than 70 per cent of people aged 55 to 64 still work. Further south, in France or Italy for example, the figure is under 40 per cent.
As the European Union tries to tackle its chronic public debt problems, the costs associated with ageing have come into focus. Rising life expectancy just as the baby-boomer generation approaches retirement means it is becoming harder to fund today’s system across most of the continent.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, wants to use its new remit for policing national budgets to push governments to change tack on pensions. Reform was “urgently required in some countries as part of current actions to restore confidence in government finance”, it warned in a report published on Thursday.
László Andor, commissioner for social affairs, said Brussels would specifically target pensions in profligate states. “We need to achieve a better balance between time spent in employment and time spent in retirement,” he said.
Although retirement ages have been raised in many countries, the Commission is concerned that these do not necessarily correlate with the age at which workers retire.
