Social Security Incentives in Belgium: An Analysis of Four Decades of Change

This chapter traces labor market reforms in Belgium over the last four decades. While Belgium was long characterized by low employment and labor force participation rates of the elderly male population, there was a reversal of this trend as the country witnessed a continuous increase in employment rates of older men from the early 2000s on. This chapter provides estimates of retirement incentives for a selected set of typical worker profiles across time and socioeconomic groups and links these series to the labor market performance in Belgium. The results show that the numerous retirement and social security program reforms have had a marked impact on incentives at the micro level. At the aggregate level, results are less clear-cut given the extreme diversity of programs and features in the Belgian institutional context.