Independent research

Topic

Retirement

Studies of retirement age, old-age dependence, and the limits of retiring on a fixed timetable.

Topic JSONAll research

Related questions

  • Under what conditions does retirement at 60 remain financially viable?
  • How do ageing and lifetime finances constrain retirement at a fixed age?
  • How can today's unemployment become tomorrow's pension pressure?
  • What happens to old-age income when early working years are spent unemployed?
  • What happens to a higher retirement age when younger workers are unemployed?
  • How do productivity and disability change the case for a later retirement age?
  • How does an ageing electorate change the politics of public spending?
  • What happens to intergenerational transfers when the median voter is older?

Relevant claims

  • GSX:POP-001: In this funded-account model, a worker who starts at 25 on R30,000 a month, contributes 12 percent, and earns a 3 percent net real return exhausts a pension equal to 60 percent of final salary around age 70 if retirement begins at 60 and life lasts to 90.
  • GSX:POP-002: In these scenarios, private wealth at 60 is R4.84 million for a stable formal career, R3.99 million after a five-year youth shock, R3.09 million if entry waits until 30, R0.91 million for a mostly informal career, and R0.15 million under persistent exclusion. The amounts are constant 2026 rand and are anchored to the same R30,000 monthly opportunity at age 25.
  • GSX:POP-003: In the average scenario, raising the comparison retirement age from 60 to 65 produces a cumulative modelled public gain of R213 billion for a one-million-person cohort. Age 70 produces R369 billion and age 75 produces R448 billion. The last five-year step adds R79 billion, about half the gain from moving from 65 to 70.
  • GSX:POP-004: In the 2025 calibration, people aged 60 or older are 15.1 percent of adults but 20.7 percent of votes cast. Applying the 2024 age-turnout pattern produces a median voter aged 43, four years older than the median adult.
  • GSX:POP-005: Among five packages that each close a hypothetical R150 billion annual ageing gap, the balanced transition has the lowest modelled welfare-loss index, 64.5. The low-visible-pain package, which leans on inflation, diffuse cuts, and continuing borrowing, scores 107.3 and leaves about R720 billion of emergency debt after ten years.
  • GSX:POP-007: If a conventional life retires at 65 and the person lives to 120, retirement lasts 55 years and the modelled pension finances only 57 percent of the target income, even with uninterrupted employment.
  • GSX:POP-008: If R1 million remains invested until age 100 at 4 percent above inflation, a living transfer at 35 becomes R12.80 million, an inheritance at 40 becomes R10.52 million, at 55 R5.84 million, at 70 R3.24 million, and at 85 R1.80 million, in constant 2026 rand.
  • GSX:POP-011: Demographic pressure, in this synthesis, is rarely a shortage of people in the abstract. It is a failure of timing, matching and institutions. Income can arrive after it is useful, workers can exist outside the jobs that need them, homes can stand in the wrong places, and reform can begin after the cheaper options have expired.

Major assumptions

Datasets

8

studies

Studies

The question each study asks, with its stable identifier.

Connected topics