Social differentiation in later life: Exploring the interaction between wealth, education and retirement trajectories in Japan and the UK

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The process of retirement is becoming more complex and differentiated in terms of timing and resources. 'Active Ageing' policies in many societies now encourage older workers to work up to and beyond retirement age. However, the reasons and opportunities to do so depend greatly on individual factors such as skills, incomes and health status. The level of education also matters in retirement process since different educational groups have different information, resources and attitudes toward investment for later life. Better educated people are for example more likely to retire on a planned basis with sufficient income and assets. Another key influence on retirement, which is absent from existing research, is the importance of household wealth - home ownership, in particular. Home ownership as an asset-base has been recognised as a key to build social and financial capital and to access increasingly privatised welfare in old age. While housing wealth is the primary component of personal wealth for the majority of households in home-owning societies, this is however not necessarily the case in societies with high rates of personal savings and/or suffering from housing price depreciation. Access to home ownership has declined among younger cohorts in many societies which means future generations are expected to work longer.This project will therefore go beyond the conventional indicators of income and formal retirement age to analyse social inequalities in later life. Instead, it will explore and identify the relationship between housing wealth, the level of education, and extended working life of ageing baby-boomers in Japan and the UK. The cross-national analysis is a vital part of the project since opportunities and constraints to work longer vary significantly between countries. In order to understand inequalities at retirement, we need to gain more insight into how institutional systems (e.g. retirement age, social security, attitudes of employers) and individual human capital (e.g. skills, qualifications) together influence retirement processes of older people. The rationales to compare Japan and the UK are: they are both home-owning societies but with contrasting housing price appreciation (UK) and depreciation (Japan); in both societies, saving towards retirement is largely privatised, and the state and employers are encouraging older people to work longer with incentives and sanctions.The main objective of this Connection project is to bring together scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds of Social Policy, Economics, Management and Housing Studies to develop the knowledge and understanding of the relationships between wealth, education, work and retirement in different welfare systems. A series of workshops are planned in Japan and the UK to provide a platform for the project members to exchange ideas, analyse comparative data, and identify methodological challenges. The workshops are not only an avenue for scholarly discussion, but also for knowledge exchange with non-academic stakeholders. It aims to provide information, analysis and insight to help policy makers, unions, employers and other organisations in supporting older people in financial and later-life career planning. The preliminary findings of the project will be disseminated using a project webpage, blog posts, academic article/s and a policy briefing including employers good practice. The project will contribute to reframing policy debate surrounding extended working life and explore early interventions in retirement planning. This is a new collaboration and the project team members have complementary research skills and expertise as well as a strong track record of comparative analysis.