Older people tend to live longer and healthier lives if they continue working past the customary retirement age. Both of my grandfathers (who became adults before Social Security existed in the United States, and who aged into old age when the standard retirement age was 65) worked until about age 75. They both lived well into their eighties, with my paternal grandfather dying from being hit by an errantly driven car rather than from disease. My parents both retired right on the dot at age 65, and I think that has been worse for their health than continuing to work longer (my dad has now died, at a younger age than his dad died at).

The article kindly submitted here mentions an issue of age imbalance in the population. "The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and World Health Organization forecast Hong Kong will have the highest share of population aged 65 years and over in Asia by 2050 with 42 percent, outpacing Japan's 39 percent." That's an exceptionally skewed age ratio for any place in the world. If people cease working at age 65 in such a place, a large proportion of the population (both children and the elderly) have to be supported by a not very large proportion of the population at working age. That's difficult to do whether support for the elderly comes from their own children or from taxpayers in general.

What's happening in many countries, of course, is that people are living far longer into old age than they imagined they possibly could decades ago.[1] Life expectancies at adult ages (say, 40, or 65) are increasing steadily all over the developed world. If people retire at the same age as decades ago, in much better health and with many more years of remaining life ahead, it's not surprising that their personal savings may run out. The response is to keep the proportion of working years over a whole lifespan a more or less constant proportion of healthy life years.

[1] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...