Women retirement age reform: evidence from Israel

ABSTRACT

This article examines the current women’s retirement age reform in Israel that raised their retirement age from 62 to 65, suggesting that high-income salaried women are more likely to benefit from the reform. It found that raising women’s Retirement Age (RA) alone does not improve their Replacement Rate (REP) and recommends implementing a two-stage policy reform. In the first stage, gender wage gaps should be mitigated during working-time period; in the second stage, women’s RA should be raised to the average of 63.81 years of the OECD countries. These suggestions should be adopted by policymakers in countries with low REP, such as Britain and Japan, accompanied by ensuring equal employment opportunities for relatively older women approaching RA.

KEYWORDS:

• Israel
• women
• retirement
• pension
• reform
• ageing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Cribb and Emmerson, “Can’t Wait.”

2. Atalay and Barrett, “The Impact.”

3. Manoli and Weber, “Nonparametric Evidence on the Effects of Financial Incentives,”160–182.

4. Cribb, Emmerson, and Tetlow, “Signals Matter?”

5. Lalive and Staubli, “How Does Raising Women’s Full Retirement Age Affect.” ‏

6. Geyer and Welteke, “Closing Routes.” ‏

7. Latulippe and Fontaine, “Effective Retirement Age.”

8. Bonnet et al., “Effects.”‏

9. Axelrad and Mahoney, “Increasing.”‏

10. Green, “Race.” ‏

11. Jefferson, “Women.” ‏

12. https://www.cbs.gov.il/EN/pages/default.aspx.

13. https://data.oecd.org/pension/net-pension-replacement-rates.htm; https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/life-expectancy-at-birth.htm; https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/pensions-at-a-glance-015_pension_glance-2015-en; https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/pensions-at-a-glance-2019_b6d3dcfc-en; https://www.oecd.org/publications/oecd-pensions-at-a-glance-19991363.htm.

14. https://www.oecd.org/publications/oecd-pensions-at-a-glance-19991363.htm.

15. https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/gender-wage-gap.htm.

16. OECD, “Net Pension,” doi:10.1787/4b03f028-en.

17. https://www.cbs.gov.il/EN/pages/default.aspx.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gil Cohen

Gil Cohen and Sagit Barel-Shaked are members of the Management Department, Western Galilee Academic College, Acre, Israel.