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Driven by the aim to increase the participation of older people in the labour force and to extend people's working lives, the Swedish Parliament passed a bill in 1998 to increase the pension eligibility age from 60 to 61 years and establish a notional defined-contribution (NDC) plan. In this article, the authors investigate the impacts towards the prolongation of working lives expected from such an intervention.

The authors apply a multinomial probabilistic model based on Swedish registry data on the birth cohorts 1937–1938 (n = 102,826) and observe differences in exit behaviour between eligible and non-eligible individuals.

The authors find that the cohorts eligible to the pension reform exit the labour market at a later age compared to non-eligible cohorts at the 61-years cut-off. The authors also find that the effect persists in the long term. Furthermore, the authors find that both men and women are equally struck by the reform.

While there exist many descriptive reports and theoretical analyses on the costs and benefits of pension reforms, this study is the first one to empirically analyse the effect of the first European NDC pay-as-you go pension plan on the potential exclusion of old-aged workers.

This study aims to investigate the impact of social grants on rural household welfare in a village located in one of the poorest provinces in South Africa – KwaZulu Natal Province. Actually, since the inception of democratic rule, the South African government has turned to social grants to address the issues of poverty, income inequality and to improve household welfare. The coverage of social grants has increased substantially with more than 17 million (about 34% of the population) South Africans being recipients of social grants. Despite having relatively well-developed social security system, poverty levels in rural parts of South Africa remains very high.

This study uses a cross-sectional households survey data conducted in Hlokozi village. A propensity score matching technique, which accounts for non-random selection of households, is applied.

The results reveal that social grants have a significant and positive impact on rural household welfare. Specifically, the nearest neighbour matching estimates suggest that the causal effect for social grants on household welfare is the region of about R5,830. Consistent with the nearest neighbouring method, the results obtained using the Kernel matching method show that social grants are significant in improving rural household welfare.

While there are a number of studies that have shed some light on how social grant reduces poverty in South Africa, there are some gaps. Firstly, only a few studies have interrogated the impact of social grants on household welfare. Secondly, most of these studies have relied on descriptive analysis, and finally, besides poverty being high in rural areas, research on the impact of social grants on rural household welfare remains thin.

This study focusses on dependent self-employment, which covers a situation where a person works for the same employer as a typical worker whilst on a self-employment contractual basis, i.e. without a traditional employment contract and without certain rights granted to “regular” employees.

The research exploits the individual-level dataset of 35 European countries extracted from the 2017 edition of the European Labour Force Survey (EU LFS) and compares the characteristics of employees and dependent self-employed individuals. Methodologically, the study relies on the estimation of a multivariate logistic regression model.

The main hypothesis assuming that dependent self-employed work most often in low-skilled occupations was empirically supported. There was also a non-linear (u-shaped) relationship between the years of accumulated experience (with a turning point at 35 years) and the likelihood of being dependent self-employed. Other results showed that dependent self-employed are less likely to be women and the dependent self-employed are more likely born outside of the countries where the dependent self-employed participate in the labour markets.

The study contributes to the field by adopting a comparable definition of dependent self-employment and exploiting the recent theoretical support of The Work Precarity Framework. The phenomenon should still be addressed by policymakers and labour office representatives, aiming to protect, primarily, vulnerable lower-skilled workers. The ongoing research should study the longitudinal dimension of dependent self-employment with a focus on motivational aspects.