Do public pensions matter for health and wellbeing among retired persons? Basic and income security pensions across 13 Western European countries Esser I, Palme J. Do public pensions matter for health and wellbeing among retired persons? Basic and income security pensions across 13 Western European countries Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: S103–S120 © 2010 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and International Journal of Social Welfare. Mortality rates suggest that elderly people in the advanced welfare democracies have experienced dra- matically improved health over the past decades. This study examined the importance of public pensions for self-reported health and wellbeing among retired persons in 13 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries in 2002–2005. New public pension data make it possible to distinguish between two qualities of pension systems: ‘basic security’ for those who have no or a short work history, and ‘income security’ for those with a more extensive con- tribution record. For enhanced cross-national com- parison, relative measures of ill-health and wellbeing were constructed to account for cultural bias in responses to survey questions and heterogeneity among countries in the general level of population health. Overall, better health is found in countries with more generous pensions, although the results are gen- dered; for women’s health, high basic security of the pension system appears to be particularly important. Women’s wellbeing also tends to be more dependent on the quality of basic security. Ingrid Esser 1 , Joakim Palme 2 1 Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University, Sweden 2 Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm/Department of Government, Uppsala University, Sweden Key words: public pensions, retired, self- reported, health, wellbeing, cross-national comparative studies Ingrid Esser, Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University, SE-10691 Stockholm, Sweden. E-mail: ingrid.esser@sofi.su.se Accepted for publication December 1, 2009 Introduction Dramatically decreased mortality rates in the advanced welfare democracies in the past century, coinciding with economic growth and expansion of public social security, have brought about an entirely new stage in the life course, where elderly people enjoy greatly improved income and health. In this perspec- tive, a ‘democratisation’ of ageing can be said to have taken place, where retired persons in their ‘third age’ today may better be described as ‘the young old, who retire early enough and in sufficiently good health to DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2397.2010.00737.x Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: S103–S120 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE ISSN 1369-6866 © 2010 The Author(s) Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA S103