“The minimum retirement age is going to have to be 70,” said Social Policy Consultant David Stanton.  He added that we should also be prepared to see this retirement age pushed back even further as average life expectancies continued to rise.

“Raising the retirement age is a very powerful option,” said Estelle James of the World Bank. She added that at she had come across situations in some countries where “some people spend more time in retirement than they do working,” and that this was clearly unsustainable in the long term.

Monika Queisser of the OECD broadly echoed her co-panelists’ analysis of the current situation. “More people need to work and they need to work longer,” she argued. The role women have to play in ensuring that our pension systems can survive the transition to an ageing population emerged as a crucial theme.

One issue raised was the fact that women are an under-used resource in the labour market in many countries. A number of reasons were given for this, many of them depressingly familiar. All three panelists noted that women often take career breaks or stop working altogether after having had children. A lack of adequate, affordable childcare provision in many countries was highlighted as one of the main causes for this.

The flipside of this question was also raised. Women are increasingly feeling they must choose between having a career and having kids, and that stark reality is having a negative effect on birthrates in many countries that do not provide sufficient child care. Here again, there was a direct link with the pensions conundrum.

Most pension schemes still rely on people of working age financing the pensions of retired people. Fewer children being born means fewer future working adults to support the elderly in this way.

“It is no surprise why the fertility rate in France is now the highest in all of Europe,” argued Queisser, pointing out that France has excellent affordable childcare and also a very high proportion of working women.

Aside from the need to encourage more women back into the workplace to help ensure societies generate enough money to finance welfare systems, the question of women in retirement was also raised, with important demographic issues coming into play.

Women, on average, live longer than men. This means that among the oldest members of our societies, people who are 80 years old or over, there are many more women than men. Sometimes these women will have relied on their husbands’ pensions for much of their retirement as they will have had to raise children rather than be employed earlier on in life. Sometimes they will have to survive on very modest pensions from low paid or part-time jobs. What seems clear is that in many countries, some of society’s oldest, poorest members are women.

The debate over how social schemes should be reformed to take into account the new demographic realities centred around one key issue: How much pension provision should come from private sources, like managed pension funds, and how much should be provided by the state.

James argued a two-pillar system would seem to be the best way forward. “One pillar would be a retirement savings element. The other would be a publicly financed part,” she said. Stanton agreed that private funds could be useful in certain circumstances, essentially for relatively wealthy pensioners. “If you are rich and throwing buckets of money into a funded scheme then the amount you pay someone to manage that scheme is proportionally low,” he said.

This was not the case for pensioners with modest revenues however. “You cannot base the provision of small pensions on the vagaries of the financial markets,” he said.  For low income pensions, a state-managed scheme was still the best, most cost effective option he argued.

Quiesser’s analysis of how pension schemes are likely to develop painted a harsh but not completely bleak picture. “I don’t see any of our countries prepared to let people die in the streets,” she said. But at the same time both she and her other panelists made it clear that they believed the era of retirement schemes that allowed people to stop work at 55 or 60 and live for perhaps more than 30 years on a comfortable income was inexorably drawing to a close.

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