Smart Retirement for the Pension System of the Future

Abstract

The history of mankind is inseparable from the issues of aging. The importance of the topic is justified by the fact that numerous famous philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Petrarca, Cardano, Simone de Beauvoir dealt with the topic and wrote about aging from different perspectives. Long, disease-free, and productive lives are all desirable for us. For a happy and full life, the above mentioned are enough or there are still opportunities. Compared to our predecessors, we can live today in an unprecedented time. Globally, the world is being shaken by three major explosions in the early 21st century: population explosion, longevity, and information explosion. A social phenomenon called the "demographic time bomb" or "population bomb", which is a problem of an aging (rapidly aging population) society, will affect the whole world in some way (socially, economically, others). According to demographic data from the United Nations (UN), the population of the Earth is growing (developing countries, many of them living in extreme poverty), but the population of industrialized countries is declining. The population of Europe as a continent and Hungary as a nation has been increasing for a long time, but it is decreasing and aging, according to the estimates. The aging of the population calls into question the ability of societies to adapt to the ongoing demographic change. The main topic of the research is one of the most significant social changes endangering the member states of the European Union: the aging of the population and its present and expected future impact on the economies, especially the pension security in Hungary.