As actress Bette Davis once said, "getting old is not for sissies". Just when you expect to be reaping the rewards of a life of hard work, there is a surprisingly good chance that you will, instead, be struggling just to get by. In the mid-2000s, an average of 13.3% of people over 65 were living in poverty in OECD countries. An astonishing 45% of Koreans of that age were income poor, as were more than one out of every five older persons in Australia, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Mexico and the US. In only eight countries was the income poverty rate 5% or less among their oldest citizens.

Pension funds suffered a blow in the financial crisis. So did public confidence. How can pensions be made more secure?

The credit crunch could usher in a new paradigm of stewardship for pension fund trustees and the dawn of a more accountable capitalism.

With ageing and pressure on public finances, monitoring the pensions market has become an important task for policymakers. The market is vast: in 2006 the total OECD funded pensions market was valued at some $24.6 trillion, with a ratio of OECD pension fund assets to OECD GDP of nearly 73% in 2006, and above 100% in a few countries.

Making pension systems financially sustainable in the face of population ageing has obliged governments to carry out reforms. This has meant finding savings, but also lower retirement incomes. According to the latest edition of Pensions at a Glance, most of the OECD countries surveyed saw a decline in benefits as a result of pension reforms, affecting retirement incomes of average earners, but also the poorest pensioners (see graph).

The OECD has only been around for half a century, but is nevertheless an ageing club. Just before it was set up in 1960, only one in twelve people was aged 65 and over on average in OECD countries.

Are older workers denied choice about when and how they retire? Certainly, the average number of years that workers across the OECD can expect to spend in retirement has risen sharply, from less than 11 years in 1970 to just under 18 years in 2004 for men, and from less than 14 years to just under 23 years for women.