mature workers with more and better jobs. The pacts have reached out to firms and other stakeholders and have included targeted profiling, assessments, specific training measures, internships, and information campaigns. These programs have primarily benefitted younger seniors (average age 54), however.<sup>185</sup>

**Employment services could also help workers move out of arduous occupations to support longer working lives, although the evidence suggests this is a challenging task** .<sup>186</sup> Belgium, for example, provides a subsidy to workers who transition into a less arduous occupation with the same employer and lose income as a result.<sup>187</sup> Retraining and job search assistance can also be specifically targeted to groups particularly likely to exit the workforce early due to working conditions.<sup>188</sup>

# 6. Conclusions: Some meta-lessons for productive longevity

**The world’s population is aging rapidly in both poor and rich countries, calling for broad policy reform to maintain welfare levels across generations.** This paper has focused on the set of policies that may help increase “productive longevity” by maintaining mature workers in the active labor force and increasing their productivity. These objectives can be considered “low-hanging fruit”: it is likely considerably easier to assist and convince active workers to stay in the labor market, with incremental efforts to strengthen human capital and tweak incentives, than to activate and train people out of long-term unemployment or inactivity towards the end of the potential working life. As our review shows, the research agenda is only beginning to develop, especially for low- and middle-income countries, and the evidence is still thin in many areas. With this important caveat in mind, a few concluding observations follow.

**All countries, rich and poor, will need to put productive longevity on the policy agenda** . Many MICs are already dealing with aging, even shrinking, populations; both LICs and MICs will face rapidly growing numbers of elderly in the future, and the shift from young to older populations can happen quickly. A wide range of policy instruments are needed to protect welfare levels in an aging world. Prolonging working lives (for a particular set of workers) and increasing the productivity of mature workers (across the board) is part of this agenda.

**The optimal policy mix will differ depending on the country context.** Mature workers, especially in poorer countries, are a heterogeneous group, with many workers, often the majority, working informally and in low-productivity occupations. Given high informality and weak enforcement, regulatory reform to social insurance, labor regulations, and taxation will only affect a smaller segment of workers, as will initiatives directed only at formal firms. In this dual labor market, however, it is this (relatively small) group of formal sector workers that can reasonably be expected to work longer. For the remainder of the mature workforce, policy needs to focus on how to avert old-age poverty by providing social protection and raising the productivity of their work.

**Poorer countries can learn from richer countries’ past mistakes and design social protection and regulatory frameworks adequately for an aging population** . Many L/MICs are now developing their social insurance systems and putting in place taxation and employment regulatory frameworks. Even

> 185 OECD 2019b. 186 OECD 2019b. 187 OECD 2018.

> 188 OECD 2019c.

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