mBank and CASE – Center for Social and Economic Research
cordially invite you to:
the 167th mBank – CASE Seminar:
The retirement age and the pension system, the labor market and the economy
Introduction:
Prof. Agnieszka Chłoń-Domińczak – Warsaw School of Economics (SGH)
Panelists:
Prof. Filip Chybalski, Lodz University of Technology
Prof. Joanna Tyrowicz, University of Warsaw
Dr. Michał Rutkowski, World Bank
The seminar will take place on October 29, 2020 from 3:00 to 4:30 pm.
The meeting will be held entirely ONLINE.
WATCH it LIVE
The seminar will be conducted in Polish.
About the seminar:
The subject of the seminar will be an assessment of how a change in the retirement age affects the financial stability of the pension system and the adequacy of the benefits it delivers, with particular emphasis on Poland’s experience. In light of ongoing demographic changes, including the aging of the population – the growing share of older people in the population as well as longer life expectancy, including longer life in good health – the retirement age has become a significant parameter for pension systems in Europe. The European Commission recommends that the retirement age move in line with changes in life expectancy.
Nine EU countries are already fulfilling this recommendation (including Finland, Italy and Slovakia); the remaining EU countries are increasing the retirement age. In Poland the opposite is happening: three years ago the age was reduced, and made equal for women and men. It’s worth stressing that in the EU only Romania has a lower retirement age for women than for men (which at 63 is higher than in Poland).
During the seminar we will discuss how this decision is affecting and will affect the level of pension payments, particularly for women, as well as the financial stability of pension systems; whether we can treat the current solutions in Poland as discrimination against women; and whether the current arrangement can be maintained in the light of ongoing global trends, particularly shrinking labor resources and a potential drop in employment, as well as the consequences of the aging population for the economy’s growth potential and the situation of public finances.
Speakers:
Dr. hab. Agnieszka Chłoń-Domińczak is the director of the Institute of Statistics and Demography at the Warsaw School of Economics and a member of the Committee of Demographic Sciences at the Polish Academy of Sciences. She leads the Polish research group Research on health, aging and retirement processes in Europe, as well as the Polish National Transfer Accounts team. In 2008-2009 she was a deputy minister of labor and social policy, held a seat on the supervisory board of social insurance provider ZUS and was a member of the Financial Supervision Commission. In 2007-2009 Dr. Chłoń-Domińczak served as deputy chair of the Social Protection Committee of the European Council, and through mid-2009 was also a member of the OECD’s Employment, Labor and Social Affairs Committee. In 2010-2017, she ran projects at the Educational Research Institute related to preparation for implementing the Polish Qualifications Framework. Her research interests include demography, pensions systems, labor markets, social policy, health and education. At the Warsaw School of Economics, Dr. Chłoń-Domińczak lectures on retirement economics, social statistics and economic and social policy. She is currently working on two international research projects.
Prof. Filip Chybalski completed his master’s degree in 2002 at the Wrocław University of Economics, earning (with distinction) the degree of doctor of economic sciences just two years later. In 2013 the Council of the School of Economic Sciences awarded him the title of habilitated doctor of economic sciences; in 2020 the President of Poland appointed him a professor. He has been affiliated with Lodz University of Technology since 2005, working in the Faculty of Management. Professor Chybalski’s research interests focus on retirement economics, models of the welfare state, economic forecasting and the use of quantitative methods in social research. He runs the Pensions & Intergenerational Relations (PIR) Research Group, an international body, and has written about 100 scholarly works, published in Poland and abroad. His professorial dissertation, The retirement age from an economic perspective: A theoretical and empirical study, won the prize for best publication on labor, social policy and human resources management from the Committee on Labor and Social Policy Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Professor Chybalski was also nominated for the 2019 Beta prize for his contribution in the field of financial management. He organizes the PenCon Pensions Conference series and is a member of the European Network for Research on Supplementary Pensions.
Prof. Joanna Tyrowicz is affiliated with the University of Warsaw, FAME|GRAPE and IZA. She received the title of professor of economics in 2019, after earning her doctorate from the University of Warsaw in 2006; she also completed studies at KU Leuven. From 2007-2017 Professor Tyrowicz worked at the Economic Institute of the National Bank of Poland, specializing in issues related to the labor market and households; she has also worked with the World Bank and the European Commission. She spent 2009 at Columbia University as a Fulbright Scholar, and 2010 as a Mellon Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. Her habilitation work, Hysteresis of unemployment in Poland, won the Lipiński prize for the best book of the year from the Polish Economic Society.
Dr. Michał Rutkowski is Global Director for Social Protection and Jobs at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. In 2015-2016 he served as Director for Multilateral Organizations. He was the Country Director for the Russian Federation and the Resident Representative in Moscow in 2012-2015, and before that director for social policy for the Bank’s South Asia region. He helped create the reform of Poland’s pension system and was the first director of the government office for reform of the social insurance system in Poland (1996-1997). Before starting work at the World Bank in 1990, Dr. Rutkowski was an assistant professor in the Economic Policy Department of the Warsaw School of Economics. He also conducted research on labor economics, macroeconomics, education, growth and productivity at the Centre for Labour Economics and the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. Dr. Rutkowski is the author of numerous publications in the area of labor markets and social insurance. He has co-authored works including the first comprehensive analysis of adjustments on the labor market during the period of economic transformation (“Labor Markets: Wages and Employment,” with R. Jackman, in Labor Markets and Social Policy in Central and Eastern Europe: The Transition and Beyond, Nicholas Barr (ed.), Oxford University Press 1994), and his most recent publications include “Reimagining Social Protection,” Finance and Development, December 2018, and “The Future of Social Protection,” in Pathways to Reducing Poverty and Sharing Prosperity in India, IBRD/World Bank, 2019.
