The retirement age should rise to at least 70 by 2050 in developed economies, as life expectancy rises above 100, according to a new report from the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The increase will be needed, as the number of people over 65 will more than triple (to 2.1 billion) by 2050 and the number of workers per retiree will halve (to just four).

Michael Drexler, head of financial and infrastructure systems at the WEF, said the expected rise in longevity was the financial equivalent of climate change. He said: “We must address it now or accept that its adverse consequences will haunt future generations, putting an impossible strain on our children and grandchildren.”

In the UK, the state pension age is due to rise from 65 in 2018 to 68 by 2046. A report for the Department for Work and Pensions earlier this year suggested that workers under 30 may not get a state pension until they are 70.

The Forum’s report — We’ll Live to 100 - How Can We Afford It? — said that governments in general need to make it easier for workers to save for their retirement, and it praised recent reforms in the UK.

The auto-enrolment scheme means that more than 6 million British workers have now been signed up automatically to a pension savings scheme, but fears remain over how much is being set aside.

The WEF said the retirement savings gap was forecast to rise from $70 trillion to $400 trillion by 2050 in the eight countries studied — Australia, Canada, China, India, Japan, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA. The gap is the amount of money required in each country to ensure a retirement income equal to 70% of a person‘s pre-retirement
income.

Jacques Goulet, president (health and wealth) at Mercer, which worked with the Forum to produce the report, said the issue was at a crisis point. “There is no one ‘silver bullet’ solution to solve the retirement gap. Individuals need to increase their personal savings and financial literacy, while the private sector and governments should provide programmes to support them,” he said.

The Forum also says that countries should aggregate and combine pensions data to give workers a full picture of their financial position. It cites Denmark, where an on-line ‘dashboard’ collates pension information to give individuals details of their different pension savings accounts.