Page 17 - IDEA Study 7 Working Beyond Pensionable Age

Graph 7: Timing of retirement and age conditional inactivity rate in 1998 and
2010

Source: Labour force survey 1998 and 2010 for the Czech Republic

The presented graphs cannot be considered as a proof that voluntary retirement
dominates in the Czech Republic; they do, nevertheless, illustrate that the majority of
older people do not retire because of health or employment problems, but stop working
and enter retirement voluntarily. The age at which most people leave the labour market
rises with a rising statutory retirement age. On the one hand, the Czech Republic is
successful in maintaining a high level of employment up until retirement age. On the other
hand, it does not seem to be able to persuade any significant proportion of older people to
continue working after they reach retirement age. However, experience from Nordic
countries (graph 2) shows that it is possible to incentivize a significantly higher proportion
of the elderly to work, thus it is evident that there is room for improvement in the area of
institutional incentives to work in the Czech Republic. Therefore, we quantify institutional
incentives to work for prime age and elderly individuals in the next chapter, in order to
evaluate the Czech institutional incentives to work.

15