Attitudes toward mandatory retirement: an international comparison

Over recent decades, whether legislation supporting mandatory retirement should exist has been debated frequently. The issue has been exacerbated by the growing number of elderly people within western societies. Using nationally representative data from the United States of America, West Germany, Great Britain, and Australia, this article provides an international comparison of individual's attitudes toward mandatory retirement. These attitudes are found to differ sharply according to country, with the Americans most strongly opposed and the Britons most accepting. Multiple regression techniques are used to address the relative importance of socio-demographic and political ideological factors in predicting attitudes toward compulsory retirement. The strongest socio-demographic predictor is education. Measures of political ideology are also significant predictors; that is, acceptance of government intervention in various areas of the labor market is positively related to the acceptance of government regulation of retirement age.