Age and Working Capacity

This chapter examines how the subjective assessment of work capacity is related to age using the Finnish Quality of Working Life Survey (QWLS) from the year 2003. The results provide clear evidence that employees' own assessment of their working capacity falls with age while there is no corresponding decline in wages by age. However, the fall in working capacity is not dramatic, as the majority of the older age groups still consider their working capacity to be relatively high in a scale from 0 to 10. Age affects working capacity, as least to the extent that the employees themselves think so.