• Poverty reduction strategies
• Gender and the MDGs

Poverty reduction strategies

In most rich countries, poverty among younger pensioners (under age 70) is no longer a major policy problem, but women typically constitute two-thirds to three-quarters or more of the elderly poor in rich countries. Poverty in rich nations is especially a problem among women aged 75 and older who live alone.

This paper examines the problems of population ageing, low incomes, and social spending on elderly in comparative perspective, with a focus on older women. The authors examine these issues in 8 OECD countries and three middle-income nations, Taiwan, China, and Mexico. They address what happens to older women, including the implications of policies relating to taxation, social spending, and transfers, as well as gender differentials in lifetime savings and retirement incomes. They also examine the implications of shared living arrangements with adult children for averting old age poverty. Finally they assess the net effects of existing policies on poverty, and what middle-income countries can learn from the anti-poverty effectiveness of different OECD approaches, as they prepare for their rapidly ageing populations.

Main policy implications include:

• governments in all high-income countries ought to provide a safety net for the elderly, with adequate and well-maintained minimum social security benefits (as is done in Canada) to ameliorate income vulnerability
• modest and even minimal cash transfers might also help low-income households in the poorer nations by directly targeting the elderly, as with a South African or Brazilian ‘widow’s pension’
• the largest effects on poverty will come from multigenerational (MG) living in these nations for some decades to come
• within middle income  countries, new social programmes can only be introduced gradually, as economic and social conditions permit. However, the ageing of the population will provide a powerful impetus for reform over the coming 2-3 decades. The choice of policy is crucial, as shown for instance by the low cost but highly target-effective Canadian efforts in fighting elder poverty

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