The Decision of Early Retirement in Spain

In Spain, as in most OECD countries, population ageing is creating a growing concern with respect to social security arrangements and in particular relative to public pension systems. The most reliable demographic forecasts show that the ageing process will continue at least until 2025. This situation is getting worse in the last decades with the presence of retirement policies that encourage exit out of the labor market before 65 years of age. Policy makers, aware of the consequences of these actions, are stressing the need of establishing measures to provide workers with incentives to extend their working lives and so reverse the dependence rate growth among active and passive people. The aim of this paper is to analyse the early retirement decision for Spanish older workers, focussing on the characteristics of the early