Page 11 - IDEA Study 3 2015 Duchodova studie

postponement of the effective retirement age, accompanied by measures addressing working conditions (so-called age management), health care and other social policies. This study provides detailed quantitative evidence on the transition of older generations of the Czech population into non-activity and retirement, providing insights into both recent trends and international comparisons. The findings presented here complement those of a parallel study (Šatava, 2015), which explores the public and private financial consequences of retirement decisions. This study's major contribution is the provision of detailed quantitative descriptions of important features related to retirement and employment decisions among the older population, which are not available from standard aggregate statistics. Using a unique dataset from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we present indicators which have not previously been made available. Since we investigate many possible dimensions and since a great deal of the patterns revealed are self-explanatory, we discuss here only the key patterns. It should be noted that this study does not aspire to identify causal relationships. Data and Methodology The data source for this study is the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), a multidisciplinary and cross-national longitudinal database of micro data on the health, socio-economic status and social and family networks of more than 85,000 individuals aged 50+ (approximately 150,000 interviews) from 20 European countries (+Israel) and their partners. The survey is focused on issues such as demographics, family and social networks; education; health and health care; work and retirement; income, consumption, wealth; help and financial transfers in the family; housing; activities; expectations; life history; quality of life; social networks; physical and biomarker measurements, the last year of life of any deceased respondents, and many other topics. Importantly, the survey also contains measures of physical and mental health and cognitive functions. The longitudinal study follows the same respondents every two years. The result is a unique dataset providing information about the state, history and development of Czech and European society. The Czech Republic has participated in all waves of data collection since 2006, on a panel sample of 6,000 respondents. A Graph Example Most of the results of this study are presented in the form of graphs comparing the Czech Republic with four groups of European regions labelled as follows: Nordic countries (N: Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands), Western countries (W: Belgium, France, Germany, and Austria), Southern countries (S: Italy and Spain), 9