1 The prolongation of life expectancy, concomitant with the shrinking of the younger population, has brought about a shift in old-age dependency ratios and placed an unprecedented level of pressure on already fragile pension systems in many developed economies (Watkins-Mathys 2012; OECD 2013). In the context of a rapidly ageing workforce, impending skills shortages, a tightening labour market, upwards shifts in the minimum age at which individuals become eligible for pensions and the gradual degra- dation of both private and public pension schemes and in an effort to avert the impeding “pensions crisis”, governments have adopted strategies such as encouraging delayed retirement (Orenstein 2011; Watkins-Mathys 2012). For instance, in the United Kingdom, the Default Retirement Age (DRA) was fully abolished in 2011 (Flynn et al. 2014), while the Japanese government has raised the mandatory retirement age twice since the 1990s (Wood, Robertson and Wintersgill 2010). Such developments have in turn brought about considerable debate in academic and policy circles on ways to prolong the working life of productive older workers (Taylor et al. 2012; Baruch, Sayce and Gregoriou 2014). Increasingly, self-employment or entrepreneurship is being heralded as a possible solution to this challenge. Encouraging self-employment among the populace can prolong working life in two ways. Firstly, self- employed individuals tend to work longer over their careers than do waged workers (Davis 2003; Weber and Schaper 2004). In the UK, almost 42 per cent of men over the age of 65 that have remained in the labour force are self-employed (Sappleton 2013). This tendency to work longer may simply have to do with a love for the job – the desire to be “one’s own boss” is perhaps the most frequently cited of the motivations to enter self-employment (Gatewood, Shaver and Gartner 1995), while empirical studies have repeatedly found high levels of job satisfaction Introduction: Pre- and Post- Retirement Self-Employment: Broadening Existing Horizons Natalie Sappleton and Fernando Lourenço N. Sappleton et al. (eds.), Entrepreneurship, Self-Employment and Retirement © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2015