Ageing and Retirement Security: United States, Mexico and Mexican Americans

Jorge H. Bravo, United Nations
Mun Sim Lai, United Nations Population Division
Gretchen Donehower, University of California, Berkeley
Iván Mejía-Guevara, Harvard University

Much of the existing literature related to retirement security focuses on specific sources of old-age financing, mainly pensions and health care. This paper examines and compares all major sources of financial security for older people in Mexico, older Mexican Americans, and non-Mexican Americans living in the United States, using the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) approach and data, which include labour income, public transfers, private transfers (intra and inter-household) and asset reallocations. Preliminary results show that older people in Mexico and the United States share some similarities in the sources of income security, including substantial reliance on public transfers, and even more so, on asset income. Also, older people in both countries generate significant labour income. Mexican Americans, differ from the two aforementioned populations in that they finance a much larger proportion of their old-age consumption from public transfers, and are the only group studied here that is a net receiver of familial transfers.