Andrew Watt of the European Trade Union Institute - who spoke at the recent FEPS/TASC Autumn Conference - has an interesting take on jobs and pensions over at the Social Europe Journal. He writes that: "The scare stories about the ‘demographic crisis’ and the threat it poses to pensions are almost always underpinned by numbers that set the size of the working age population against the number of elderly people. What is important, though, is the number of people who are actually working and supporting not only the elderly, but also children and those of working age not working, specially the unemployed.
Understanding this is important for the current austerity-versus-stimulus debate. Often calls for fiscal pain now are justified with reference to the need to ‘prepare for aging’ by reducing government debt. Yet evidently what is vital to achieve that same end is to reduce unemployment, and to do it now before it becomes ossified, as happened in previous European recessions". You can read the rest of Andrew's post here.
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