The Geneva Association launched its Four Pillars research programme with a view to identifying possible solutions to the issue of the future financing of pensions and, more generally, to organising social security systems in our post-industrial societies.
Demographic trends - especially increased life and health expectancy - could be seen as positive if we were able to devise ways of enabling "ageing in good-health populations" to make a valid economic and social contribution to the functioning of our service economies over the decades to come.
The reorganization of end-of-career and the new age-management strategy - in which gradual retirement is destined to play a key role - involved in establishing this pillar, also correspond to many of the changes (e.g. in quality of work and the life cycle) that are specific to our contemporary service economies.
The Geneva Association's studies at the European and international levels have shown that, among other things, continuing training, worktime reduction, job redesign and a review of the seniority-pay principle, will need increasingly to be addressed by individual insurance companies.
Developing multi-pillar pension systems and promoting an extension of occupational life depend on certain conditions being met and will need to be preceded by a coherent, broad-based, informed and ongoing debate of all these issues.