Introduction

Commenting upon precarity in later life, Fine (2021: 175) remarked recently: ‘Risk among those of advanced age is not a matter of choice. Nor can it be reduced, it is argued, to an outcome of lifestyle options of individuals. It is instead produced by the sociocultural, economic and political environment, requiring political actions to address issues concerning inequality.’ This book has sought to understand better how international retirement migration interacts with precarity in later life, and in doing so, it ultimately dovetails with Fine's observation. We built our study based on two observations. The first is that retirement migration is a growing phenomenon, one that scholars have often attributed to: (1) the increased buying power and resultant consumption among older people in countries of the Global North; (2) the globalisation of communications; and (3) the global leisure, healthcare and housing markets targeting older citizens of richer countries. Based on this, scholars have tended to view retirement migration as differing from the migration of younger people, in that it does not result from the search for better work conditions. Instead, retirees benefit from their pensions; they therefore diverge from younger people because they can use their economic power to relocate abroad and improve their lifestyles, particularly by consuming leisure and adventure. To do so, they move to poorer countries, either in the Global South or in European countries with lower costs of living, where they exploit the human, economic and natural resources of the host countries. In so doing, they also reproduce postcolonial power relations and structures (see, for example, Benson, 2013, 2015; Hayes, 2018a, 2018b). Based on these observations, many scholars depict retirement migration as a practice mostly performed by privileged older people who use their power for leisure purposes.

Second, other researchers argue that precarity increasingly shapes older people's lives in Global North countries, despite existing welfare state policies aimed at providing social protection to them. Drawing on the works of such scholars as Lain et al (2019, 2021) and Grenier et al (2021), we emphasised that such precarity can be economic, social or linked to needs for healthcare or assistance with daily life, and that these result from major transformations in the welfare state, the labour market and the household within a broader global context.