Migrating to a new country in late life: A review of the literature on international retirement migration

Abstract

BACKGROUND In the last few decades, a substantial number of older adults have migrated to new countries around the retirement age to raise their quality of life, a phenomenon that has been labeled as international retirement migration. The scattered body of research on this type of migration across disciplines has made it difficult to get an overview of why retirement migrants move and how they fare in their destination countries. OBJECTIVE This paper accumulates findings from research on international retirement migration from different disciplines to obtain a comprehensive picture of the field. We do so by (1) evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of methodological approaches, (2) reviewing empirical findings, and (3) discussing future research directions.