Exit or activation for early retirees and disabled people

8 Exit or activation for early retirees and disabled people  

A last important area of social policy susceptible to be affected by activation strategies encompasses pensions, early retirement programmes and disability benefits. In France, governments have resorted extensively, from the late 1970s and into the 1990s, to early exit schemes, but they have been trying to reverse this tendency for the last years, with limited success so far. 

The latest pension reform (2003) must be seen in the light of the general demographic trend and attempts at better coping with financial constraints. Even if the reform primarily concerns persons who have reached retirement age, it also affects age cohorts approaching retirement as well as younger persons on account of altered insurance prerequisites (Kaufmann 2004). 

Although the now explicitly adopted goal is to curb early retirement development, several measures were adopted to provide financial security to older 

From the mid-2000s, and especially since 2003, under pressure coming from the European Employment Strategy co-ordination (the so-called Lisbon objectives for increasing the effective age of retirement), the French government has devised new action plans with the purpose of increasing employment rates of people over 50. However, as the Table 11 shows, these efforts have not yet shown clear outcomes. 

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