International Longevity Centre Global Alliance - Designing the Future of Ageing

25th June 2017

Faculty member Esteban Calvo has two new publications. The first is “Retirement Sequences of Older Americans: Moderately Destandardized and Highly Stratified Across Gender, Class, and Race” in The Gerontologist  and “Rural pension reform in China: A critical analysis” also co-authored by Esteban Calvo appears in the Journal of Aging Studies.

The first article  was co-authored with Ignacio Madero-Cabib and our director Ursula Staudinger. Here sequence analysis was used to model labor-force patterns among older Americans. The authors were surprised to uncover patterns that seemed more standardized, irreversible, and age graded than previously reported. They argue that previous literature may have overstated the destandardization of labor-force patterns revolving around retirement because the pattern gets lost when modeling a continuous process as individual transitions. These patterns got further complicated by gender, class, and race differences.

The second publication “Rural pension reform in China: A critical analysis” also co-authored by Esteban Calvo appears in the Journal of Aging Studies. The researchers analyzed rural pension reform in China, which has done an impressive job in rapidly enrolling most of its rural population in a voluntary pension system. Working age adults signed up in part due to a clever family-binding policy. However, China's rural pension scheme needs more adequate social pension benefits, something that seems affordable when comparisons are made with other developing countries with social pensions, such as those in Latin America and Caribbean.

To request reprints of either of these articles, please contact the Columbia Aging Center: ColumbiaAgingCenter@cumc.columbia.edu.

Posted by ILC-USA