Social Security and Retirement in Latin America: Relation to Youth Unemployment

Bernardo L. Queiroz , Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Laeticia R. De Souza, Population Studies Center / University of Campinas (NEPO / UNICAMP)

There are two factors that are normally brought into the discussion of trends in the labor supply of the elderly. First, as mortality declines individuals with worse health reach older ages and are less able to stay in the labor force. Recente evidence, for Latin America, shows that older adults health status are improving in the region at the same time as labor force declines. This finding indicates that a large share of those not working beyond age 60 have increasingly good health, and that health variation is therefore not the key reason for current retirement trends. The second point is that changes in the elderly labor force participation have an important impact on the jobs available for the youth (Bertoni and Brunello, 2017; Mohnen, 2017; Munnel and Wu, 2012). In this sense, the labor market functions as a “closed-box” and new workers would only be able to find work if older workers leave the labor force. The aim of this paper is to analyze the former theory in the context of the Brazilian and Latin American economies. We use data from the Brazilian household survey (PNAD) and Brazilian Employment Survey (PME) to investigate the relation between elderly labor force and youth unemployment. Preliminary results do not show evidence of a strong relation in the region.

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 Presented in Session P3. Poster Session Migration, Economics, Environment, Methods, History and Policy