Economic issues form a key dimension for both globalisation and social gerontology. As noted in Chapter Three, globalisation is often seen as an essentially economic phenomenon. Throughout this book we have contended that economic processes represent only one aspect of globalisation, albeit an important one, and that they need to be understood as interacting with other levels or ‘scapes’. We have also pointed out in Chapter Two, that old(er) age has often been conflated with retirement and/or poverty and therefore it is important to examine the different ways in which economics and later life interact in the contemporary world.

As we have noted, the institutionalisation of the life course during the period of first modernity meant that retirement became the dominant temporality through which old age was understood. Alongside this the creation of state retirement pensions meant that the nation state became the dominant spatial actor through which retirement and economic ‘sufficiency’ in later life was organised. Consequently, modernist social gerontology has been focused upon the nation state as a welfare state. However, both these temporal and spatial assumptions have been subject to a sustained challenge. From the late 1980s through to the early 2000s, rates of early labour market exit (LME) successively ‘de-standardised’ retirement throughout most of the advanced industrialised economies (Kohli and Rein 1991, Henkens and Tazelaar 1994, 1997, Maule 1995, van Dalen and Henkens 2002, Guillemard 2003). This undermined the connection between ageing and retirement as well as the connection between retirement and state pensions. In the UK this process had been supported by an increasing reliance on occupational and private pensions which further de-institutionalised retirement and created opportunities for certain groups of workers to leave the labour market early with a relatively high degree of financial security. But it has also made income in later life far more contingent and dependent upon the global economy (Blackburn 2002). Early labour market exit also became a feature of many other pension systems where a combination of economic restructuring and previously established generous pension entitlements made it attractive for older workers to retire rather than continue to work (Ebbinghaus 2006).