apply additionally, because the research data centre is not allowed to have the social security
number in its reach. A regular procedure is not yet in place for record-to record-linkage, but in
case of convincing new results from research project using the improved data a recurrent
regular procedure seems to be possible. The next step of record to record linkage would be the
match with data that have other identifiers than the social security number. These could be tax
data or data from the old age provision schemes.
3.2 Match of process generated data with survey data
The linkage of pension fund records with survey data would improve the life-course
information of many surveys, which suffer from recollection errors of the interviewed persons
or left censoring. Research on retirement or disability would on the other hand gain from
subjective information gathered via survey. Self assessed health and retirement planning
would give crucial inside in early retirement, a research topic of utmost importance. Objective
indicators on the health status could also be included (biomarkers). However, also for survey-
to-record linkage is reidentification not easily done. The self-government boards of the
pension fund have to give their consent to the project, because the cooperation of all pension
insurances is again essential. The survey must include the informed consent of the
interviewed person, who must also provide his or her social security number. The collected
number must than be searched for in the central register of all socially insured persons. The
next step is the collection of the data from the pension fund records.
4. Future Developments: European and International Challenges
The pension fund exchanges data with most public pension funds worldwide, because social
security treaties require that migrants should not be discriminated against and should have an
easy one-step procedure to apply for their pension in just one country. Most important
partners in data exchange are the member states of the European Union, who act under the
common framework of the same regulation. The exchanged information is only to a small part
included in the statistics. A common effort to gather more information on transnational
working biographies could be a further step to improve the data.
A common international pool of data on public or publicly supported old age provisions
could be a further step to support comparative research. This would require improved
multilingual meta data and a very accurate documentation, because the differences between
the national security systems could easily lead to misconceptions.
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