Retirement is for many the goal in life, sad to say, but it is so in many cases. Especially if you’ve been used to working in an occupation you dislike for at least eight hours of your life. It is then that a period of liberation arrives, where you no longer have to show up at the office at eight in the morning, when your time is entirely controlled by you, when you can really do what you like while (hopefully) you are receiving a pension. That moment that you so longed for has arrived, late, but it has arrived.
For many, retirement means exploring the world or move to a place far from home. And of course, when people consider what makes a place an ideal place to retire, landscapes of white sand, warm climates and sunny days usually come to mind. However, we are quite wrong.
This is what the Global Retirement Index (GRI) says, which examines retirement from a different, more quantitative perspective, and annually analyzes 44 different countries and classifies them according to their retirement security. That is, study which are the best countries in the world to retire based on a large number of metrics.
The index considers 18 factors, which are grouped into four general categories: Health (per capita health expenditure, life expectancy and uninsured health expenditure), Quality of life (levels of happiness, water and sanitation, air quality, other environmental factors and biodiversity/habitat), Material Well-being (per capita income, income equality and employment levels), Retirement finances (public debt, old age dependency, interest rates, inflation, governance, tax burden and bank delinquencies ).
Using these 18 metrics, a score from 0.01 to 1 is determined for each country, which is then converted to a percentage. This graph made by Visual Capitalist illustrates, with data from the Global Retirement Index, which countries are best equipped to support their elderly citizens and, therefore, which are the best to retire in 2022.
You can consult the graphic in its maximum resolution here.
First of all, and surprisingly (no trace of sun and sand), is Norway, with an overall score of 81%. It is the most favorable country for retirement on the list. And reasons are not lacking: for starters, it has the highest score in the Health category, largely due to its high average life expectancy, which is 83 years, or 9 years more than the world average. Norway also has the highest score of all countries in Governance, a category measured by assessing the country’s levels of corruption, political stability and the effectiveness of government.
Second on the list is another European country, Swiss, with a score of 80%. It is the highest ranked country in environmental factors and also has the highest score in the Finance in Retirement category.
European countries dominate the top 10 in the ranking: Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Denmark and the Czech Republic, ranked from first to tenth.
But how do the different continents compare? North America (only includes two countries in the ranking) Canada (15th place) and the USA (18th place), have the highest score: 69%. Western Europe follows, with 66%. In third place is Eastern Europe and Central Asia (49%.) And at the tail are Latin America (37%) and South Asia (32%).
As fertility rates decline and people live longer, the United Nations predicts that the world population aged 65 and over will increase from 9.7% this year to 16.4% in 2050. Retirement ages among the countries surveyed range from 55 to 68, with some experts arguing that this age requirement will get higher and higher.
That is why many countries are choosing to change their pension policies in an effort to encourage people to stay longer in the workforce. This issue has been widely debated in Spain recently, where the Minister of Social Security stated that a “cultural change” must be made. One like the one that is happening in Europe, where workers increasingly work more years and delay the retirement age, even up to 75 years.