Meeting the challenge of population ageing

The welfare state is based on a life course that no longer matches current experience. It assumes that people, or at least men and unmarried women, spend their early years in education and then go on to a long period in work followed by a short period in retirement, when they live off the pension accumulated while in work or, more usually, the tax and pension contributions of those still in work. At a time when many people did not survive to draw their pensions or, if they did, survived for only a few more years, welfare systems coped reasonably well. It is less clear whether they will be able to do so in the future. The scale of the challenge is shown by a single stark statistic. If there is no change in work and retirement patterns, the ratio of workers to older inactive persons in the countries that were European Union member states in May 2004 (the EU-25), now at 3:1, is projected to increase to 1:1 in 2050.