Health Capacity to Work for Older Adults
This paper provides the first systematic assessment of health capacity to work for older adults across 20 Eastern European and Central Asian countries, finding that while many workers have the potential to extend their careers by several years, the estimated additional capacity varies significantly depending on the methodology and baseline year used.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
As populations around the world grow older, governments face a difficult arithmetic problem: fewer young workers are available to support a growing number of retirees. To keep pension systems solvent and economies running, many nations have begun raising the official age at which people can stop working. This policy shift rests on a single, crucial assumption: that people today are healthy enough to keep working past the ages where their grandparents retired. The question is not just whether people are living longer, but whether those extra years are healthy enough to be productive. If a person lives to eighty but spends the last decade in poor health, simply extending the retirement age does not solve the problem of labor shortages. To answer this, researchers must look beyond the calendar and measure the actual physical and mental capacity of older adults to remain in the workforce.
A team of researchers from the World Bank Group set out to test this assumption across twenty countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, a region undergoing rapid demographic change. They asked a straightforward question: if people today were as healthy as people were in the past, how many more years could they work? To find the answer, they used two different ways of measuring health. The first method looked at death rates as a proxy for overall health, assuming that if fewer people are dying at a certain age, the population is generally healthier. The second method looked directly at self-reported health, disability, and daily living limitations among older men. By comparing current labor participation rates against these health benchmarks, the researchers could estimate how many additional years of work capacity exist in the region.
The results revealed a complex and uneven picture. When the researchers used death rates to measure health, the answer depended heavily on which year they chose as a starting point for comparison. In some countries, such as Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Türkiye, and Ukraine, the data suggested that older workers have the capacity to work between 1.7 and 7.7 additional years. In these places, health has improved faster than the number of people actually working has increased, leaving a gap of unused potential. However, in other nations like Albania, Belarus, and Bulgaria, the calculation turned negative. This did not mean people were less healthy; rather, it meant that labor participation among older adults had already risen so high that it outpaced the gains in health. In these countries, the capacity to work is already fully utilized, or even exceeded, meaning that simply raising the retirement age further would not automatically bring more people into the workforce.
The second approach, which relied on direct health surveys from four specific countries—Bulgaria, Croatia, Poland, and Romania—offered a different perspective. By modeling what would happen if retirement decisions were based solely on health rather than pension rules, the researchers estimated that men aged 65 to 74 have the capacity to work an additional 3.94 years. This figure comes with a high degree of statistical confidence, falling within a narrow range of 3.55 to 4.31 years. However, the study also noted a critical nuance: if these extra years of work were realized, the rate of disability among the working population would rise, particularly after age 70. This suggests that while many older adults are healthy enough to work, pushing them into the labor market without support could shift the burden from retirement benefits to disability claims.
The study concludes that there is no single solution for the entire region. In countries where health has improved significantly but participation has not kept pace, there is genuine room to extend working lives. In others, where older workers are already staying on the job, the challenge is different. The researchers argue that raising the retirement age will only work if it is paired with other policies, such as workplace adaptations for aging bodies, retraining programs for physically demanding jobs, and better disability insurance. Without these supports, simply changing the law may not unlock the potential of an aging workforce, and in some cases, could simply move the financial strain from one part of the system to another. The capacity to work exists, but it is not a guarantee; it depends entirely on the specific health and economic conditions of each country.
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