Sozialalmanach - Caritas Luxembourg

PAYGO and funding as methods of financing. Virtually all other European countries have
also introduced fiscal incentives to encourage people to take up supplementary private
pension insurance, fairly successfully in Austria and Spain. In the 1990s, a number of
countries, notably Belgium, France, Ireland, the Netherlands and Portugal, have started to
build up reserve funds in order to maintain adequate pension provision when the baby-boom
generation retires. Also changes in indexation rules have helped to reduce future pension
reliabilities. In Austria, Germany, Italy and Spain restrictions have gone hand in hand
with attempts to upgrade minimum retirement guarantees. Measures to combine work
and retirement via partial pension benefits have been introduced in Austria, Belgium,
Denmark and Germany. In Western Europe, one of the most profound reforms was enacted
by Sweden in the mid-1990s, which introduced a small mandatory funded element and
transferred an important part of the risk associated with aging to retirees. The latter was
done by indexing future benefits to the life expectancy of the retiring cohort and by linking
future benefits to net wages. Benefits will be lower if life expectancy continues to increase
and net wages continue to grow slow, but the reform also continued to ensure a universal
guaranteed pension for low-income pensioners 26 . The Swedish legislation has also heavily
influenced reforms in other countries, like Italy, Latvia and Poland 27 . And while Germany
and the United Kingdom are about to raise the retirement age, Finland has developed
policy approaches to improve occupational health, work ability and well-being of aging
workers, in order to keep older workers in the workforce as long as possible 28 .
Social services have experienced a comeback lately. Spending on childcare, education,
health, and elderly care, alongside training and employment services, has increased
practically everywhere in Western Europe over the past decade. Almost a fifth of all jobs
created in the EU between 1995 and 2001 occurred in the health and social services sector
as aging and longevity make demands on professional care that working families can no
longer meet. Social services and family policies have also witnessed some innovation in
both substantive and organizational terms, with a view to responding to the rising needs of
the elderly population, the changing gender division of labour and new forms of poverty
and exclusion 29 .
All welfare states have indisputably been weakening their traditional male breadwinner
bias. In Scandinavia the expansion of services to families began in the 1970s in tandem
with the rise in female labour supply. It was in large part this policy of socializing caring
responsibilities that catalysed the dual-earner norm. In most other European countries,
26 Palme (2005).
27 Ferrera & Gualmini (2000); Fultz & Ruck (2001).
28 Clark & Whiteside (2003); Immergut et al. (2007).
29 Hemerijck (forthcoming).
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