Primary Health Care

Falkingham concludes that these results show the importance of economic activity in the determination of dependency and in so doing they point to the inadequacy of much of the debate on retirement provision. The 1983 Green Paper on the reform of the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS) used the argument that future higher dependency levels would be too great for the economy to bear without a reduction in the cost of state pension provision. In failing to acknowledge the importance of economic activity on dependency, policy options other than the reduction in the cost of pensions, such as the scope for increasing employment levels, increasing female labour market participation and encouraging 'guestworkers' into the economy were not considered. The author concludes her paper with a brief discussion of some of these alternatives, acknowledging that there are ethical and practical considerations to be taken into account.