published in: IZA Journal of Labor Studies 2016, 5, 16 (2016)
For the last two decades, the increase of employment among cohorts of individuals aged 50+ has been a policy objective on the European employment agenda. The present paper takes stock of the situation as observed in Belgium over the time period 1997-2011. First, we provide analysis on the evolution of older workers' employment in Belgium and its neighboring countries Germany, France and the Netherlands using the EU Labour Force Survey. Second, we characterize the different employment and hours of work patterns for different age sub-groups (50-54, 55-59, 60-64) and provide evidence on their respective evolution. The results show that employment rates among older workers started to catch-up with employment rates of younger cohorts as of 2001, and with more acuity after 2006. This effect dominates the observed negative effect on hours of work and hence leads to an increase in total hours of work of the cohort – net of any purely demographic effects.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.