Old-age pensions and population health: A global and cross-national perspective

Abstract

Social security schemes can reduce poverty risk and increase resources available for individuals and families, and these schemes may therefore have an important role to play in population health in both high- and middle-income countries. This article analyses the linkage between effective coverage of old-age pension schemes and life expectancy in a sample of 93 high- and middle-income countries at the end of the twenty-first century. The analyses support the notion that social security schemes, and especially programmes with a universal approach, may have positive effects on population health, even after taking into account the effect of levels of economic development, income inequality and essential characteristics of health care systems. This article also demonstrates that there is no evident relationship between levels of economic development and social security legislation: historically, late industrialisers were often first in introducing major social security schemes, and today there is no clear cross-national relationship between levels of economic development and the proportion of the population covered by old-age pension schemes.

Keywords:

• middle-income countries
• population health
• old-age pensions
• social security
• life expectancy

Acknowledgements

This article originates from the project ‘Vietnamese social policy in comparative perspective: towards social policy reform’, which was a series of workshops organised by The Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, Sweden and Institute for European Studies at the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences. These workshops were financed by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). I would like to thank the participants in these workshops for their stimulating comments.