Living Longer and Delaying Retirement : What Is Fairness in a Context of Population Aging

This paper discusses intergenerational equity in terms of age of retirement and average number of years to be spent in retirement for successive cohorts in Canada. It demonstrates that using average retirement age (or median retirement age) as was done in the past in Canada, leads to very misleading conclusions and possible misguided policymaking. Instead, using the working life table approach shows that the effective retirement age has been increasing in Canada while the number of years spent in retirement has been fairly stable when comparing cohorts born in the mid- 1930s to those born in the early 1950s. Projections indicate this pattern will likely be similar among all cohorts of the baby-boom generation. In other words, while life expectancy at age 50 has been increasing, most of those added years have been working years rather than years spent in retirement. These observed trends bring counterarguments within the discussion around increasing the normal age of retirement in the name of intergenerational equity