Choix d’âge de départ en retraite et emploi des seniors en France : que nous ont appris les réformes passées ?. Fondements microéconomiques, bouclage macroéconomique et évaluations des réformes

For over 30 years, reforms to the French pension system have ensured its financial sustainability in a changing demographic environment. In addition to ensuring the system?s sustainability, they have avoided prematurely excluding older people from employment. The aim of this article is to put these two results into perspective, on the basis of the pension reforms carried out in France. Firstly, raising the age for full retirement creates an initial dividend by reducing the number of pensioners and increasing the number of contributors with the new age for full entitlement, thereby reducing pension fund deficits for the first time. Secondly, raising the retirement age ?causes? an increase in the employment of older people before they reach full retirement age, and therefore increases the number of contributors, which then generates a second dividend for the pension funds and for the economy as a whole. To raise the effective retirement age, we have shown that incentives such as premiums are a powerful tool for voluntarily raising the retirement age, rather than imposing this by raising the statutory retirement age. The positive effects of raising the retirement age on the employment of older people are tentative, because they are based on the absence of measures that would break up the anticipation of a lengthening of the working life of older people, such as the various specific measures that help to prevent non-employment at the end of the life cycle.