Bolivia lowers retirement age to 58

Bolivia enacted a law Friday lowering the country's retirement age to 58, bucking a global trend in which countries push people to work longer to counteract the burden on national treasuries of rising life expectancy.
Critics say the law, which also nationalises the pension system and generously extends coverage to the poor, is overly ambitious and unsustainable. Leftist President Evo Morales signed the bill surrounded by members of the powerful Bolivian workers federation, which helped draft the law.
Bolivia's current retirement age is 65 for men and 60 for women. "We are fulfilling a promise with the Bolivian people. We are creating a pension system that includes everyone," Morales he said at the signing ceremony. The law, which takes effect in a year, also extends pensions to the 3 million people 60 percent of the working population who labour in the informal economy as everything from street vendors to bus drivers.
"Evo Morales thinks about the poor people, so they can have something for when they get old," said Juan Quispe, 45, a father of three without a pension who sells ice cream on the street outside the National Palace. The new law will allow Bolivia's 70,000 miners to retire two years earlier or as soon as age 51 if they have worked in life-sapping conditions deep underground. Mothers with more than three children will also get special treatment: the right to retire at age 55.
Morales, an Aymara Indian and the country's first indigenous president, grew up a dirt-poor llama herder and later went on to become a coca-growers' union militant. The socialism he preaches is rooted in the communitarianism of his native culture. Since taking office in 2006, he has put this landlocked Andean nation's natural gas reserves, main phone carrier and electrical grid under state control. Other countries are moving in the opposition direction. France has led the charge to raise the minimum retirement age in Europe, increasing it last month to 62, with full benefits not available until age 67. Even socialist Cuba has raised its retirement ages from 60 to 65 for men, and from 55 to 60 for women.