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ple born in developed countries after World War II retires.
• Populations are aging rapidly as a result. The higher the percentage of older people, the harder it is for a country to finance its pension system because relatively fewer younger workers are paying taxes.
• In China, the 65-and-older population will rise from 11 percent of the working-age population in 2010 to 42 percent in 2050. In the United States, this old-age dependency ratio will rise from 20 percent to 35 percent.
• In response, governments are raising retirement ages and slashing benefits. In 30 OECD countries, the average age at which men can collect full retirement benefits will rise to 64.6 in 2050, from 62.9 in 2010; for women, it will rise from 61.8 to 64.4. Italy is raising the age from 59 to 65.
• In the wealthy countries it studied, the OECD found that the pension reforms of the 2000s will cut retirement benefits by an average 20 percent.
• Even France, where government pensions have long been generous, has begun modest reforms to reduce costs. France has raised the number of years people must work before they can receive a full pension from 41.5 to 43. More changes are likely coming.
• "France is a retirees' paradise now," says Richard Jackson, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "You're not going to want to retire there in 20 to 25 years."
• The fate of government pensions is important because they are the cornerstone of retirement income. Across the 34-country OECD, governments provide 59 percent of retiree income, on average. The government's share ranges as high as 86 percent in Hungary. In the United States, the world's largest economy, it's about 38 percent.
• If rich countries don't cut pension costs even more, says Standard & Poor's, a credit-rating agency, their government debt will more than triple as a percentage of annual economic output by 2050. The debt of most countries would drop to what is commonly called junk status.
• Many of those facing a financial squeeze in retirement can look to themselves for part of the blame. They spent many years before the Great Recession borrowing and spending instead of setting money aside for old age. In the U.S., households took on an additional $5.4 trillion in debt -- an increase of 75 percent -- from the start of 2003 until mid-2008, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The savings rate fell from nearly 13 percent of after-tax income in the early 1980s to 2 percent in 2005.
• The National Institute on Retirement Security estimates that Americans are at

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