Further, about one fth of the individuals aged 50-64 su⁄ers from more than three bad mental health symptoms like a depression, pessimism, suicidality or guilt. Extremes are formed by France (30.7 percent) and Germany (15.2 percent). Finally, about 73 percent of the individuals in our selected sample have a good self-perceived physical health.5
Table 4.2 about here.
Table 4.3 about here.
As illustrated in Blanchet, Brugiavini and Rainato (2005), the transition from full time employment to full time inactivity has become less relevant over the last decades. The standard pattern to retirement has been supplemented by alternative pathways, where an individual may be unemployed, pre-retired or on sickness or disability insur- ance before actually retiring and drawing most resources from pension benets. Given the wide variety of systems that persons aged 50 and over can make use of to bridge the period between regular employment and retirement, it can be argued that it is useful to focus on labour force participation and lumping together other social states like being unemployed or on disability insurance. In this study, we consider an individual as par- ticipating in the labour market if she or he has worked for pay either as an employee or as a self-employed during the four weeks preceding the interview. Table 4.4 shows participation rates for men in the SHARE countries. These partici- pation rates are given for three di⁄erent age classes. As is clear from the table, there is quite some variation in labour force participation across age classes and countries. For example, in the Nordic countries (Denmark and Sweden) and in Switzerland, participa- tion of men aged 55-64 is relatively high, with levels far above the Lisbon target (across gender) of 50 percent. In Belgium, participation for the same age group is less than 40 percent. As could be expected, participation is higher for men aged 50-54, although here too there is considerable variation between the di⁄erent countries. Similar gures for women are provided by Table 4.5. Participation of women is lower than that of men at the country level and for the di⁄erent age groups. The notable exception here are French women; we have no explanation for this. Roughly speaking, for women the same broad tendencies between countries can be observed as for men. For example, labour force participation is highest in the Nordic countries and Switzerland, while it is lowest in Belgium.
Table 4.4 about here.
Table 4.5 about here.