More than half of pensioners in Bulgaria still working do so out of financial necessity
About 53 per cent of people in Bulgaria who continue working after starting to receive an old age pension do so out of financial necessity, according to figures for 2023 published by EU statistics agency Eurostat on December 9.
Eurostat said that 16.7 per cent of people in Bulgaria continue working after starting to receive an old age pension.
The poll found that of those continuing to work, 22.4 per cent of Bulgarian pensioners said that they did so because they enjoy being productive.
A total of 9.3 per cent did so because, in the words of Eurostat, they found it financially attractive, while 8.9 per cent said that they wanted to stay socially integrated.
A majority of people in the EU did not work (22.4 per cent) or stopped working (64.7 per cent) during the six months following the receipt of their first old-age pension.
Only 13 per cent continued working.
Among those who continued to work, about half continued as before while for the other half, there were changes, such as changing jobs, working fewer hours, or doing a second job while stopping the first job.
The highest share of people who continued working were found in the Baltic countries, Estonia (54.9 per cent), Latvia (44.2 per cent) and Lithuania (43.7 per cent), while the lowest share were registered in Romania (1.7 per cent), Greece (4.2 per cent) and Spain (4.9 per cent).
The main reasons for people to continue to work after receiving an old-age pension were because they enjoyed working and being productive (stated by 36.3 per cent of people) or did so due to financial necessity (28.6 per cent).
A desire to maintain social integration (11.2 per cent) and the financial attractiveness of work (9.1 per cent) were also mentioned as reasons for continuing to work. A smaller proportion, 3.5 per cent, continued working because their partner was still employed.
Denmark (61 per cent), the Netherlands (59.6 per cent) and Italy (51.7 per cent) had the highest proportion of people who continued working because they enjoyed it.
By contrast, the smallest proportion of people reporting this reason was in Spain (17.9 per cent), Cyprus (19.1 per cent) and Slovakia (20.4 per cent).
On the other hand, financial necessity was the main reason for continuing to work in Cyprus (68.6 per cent), Romania (54.3 per cent) and Bulgaria (53.6 per cent), while Sweden (9.4 per cent), Czechia (12.4 per cent) and Luxembourg (14.4 per cent) registered the lowest share, Eurostat said.
(Photo: Clive Leviev-Sawyer)
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