In our series of international seminars discussing ‘A Research Agenda for Ageing and Social Policy‘ this online event will highlight two key issues of ageing and social policy - combating ageism and promoting active ageing. Clemens Tesch-Römer and Liat Ayalon will present cultural and societal patterns of age-related discrimination and their impact on social and public policies, and they propose research to expand the evidence base. Oxana Sinyavskaya will then follow with an analysis of the active ageing concept that has shaped social policies around ageing over the past decades. Synthesizing scientific and political perspectives, she will reveal the needs for further research and policy development.

Alexander Peine, Anne Meissner and Anna Wanka will present findings from their chapter on digitalisation in the book ‘A Research Agenda for Ageing and Social Policy’. Starting from a critical view on ‘technological solutions’ promoted by policymakers to address problems of ageing, they explore technology and innovation policy as an important arena that makes ageing and shapes social policies.

This international seminar served to launch the book “A Research Agenda for Ageing and Social Policy” to a wider audience to discuss with selected authors, how these transitions can be shaped and facilitated by social policy interventions to ensure more equal chances for all, less ageism and better adaptation to technological change – from active and healthy ageing, digitalized labour markets and long-term care to intergenerational community-building, innovative services and new types of benefit systems.

The seventh BBinar focused on the situation of long-term care systems in the Western Balkans and discuss main questions, based on findings of recent research by the Red Cross of Serbia.

Das DI.S.C.O.P.M.B. Projekt entwickelt frei zugängliche Lehr- und Lernmaterialien zur Förderung der diversitätssensiblen Pflege für ältere Menschen mit Migrationserfahrung. In diesem Webinar wird das DI.S.C.O.P.M.B. Trainingsprogramm Lehrenden in Pflege- und Gesundheitsberufen und anderen interessierten Personen vorgestellt. Das Webinar ist zweisprachig (Englisch/Deutsch).

The DI.S.C.O.P.M.B project develops freely available educational materials to promote diversity sensitive care for older people with migration experience. In this Webinar, the DI.S.C.O.P.M.B. training package is presented to teachers in care and health professions and other interested individuals. It is a bilingual event (English/German).

In this international seminar, Minna-Liisa Luoma (THL – Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare) will provide an overview of the social and healthcare reform, before presenting some first results from its evaluation.

The sixth BBinar will focus on the progress and challenges of digital labour platforms in Western Balkans and Eastern Partnership countries and discuss fair standards of new forms of work.

This international seminar aims to provide a comparative view on research with register data in the Nordic countries and in Austria.

This webinar presented the GUIDE survey and opportunities for Ausrtia to join the GUIDE survey as a flagship of European research infrastructure.

In this international seminar, Dr. Jasper Tjaden will share some of his recent work using digital data sources for studying various aspects of migration including measuring international migration, irregular migration, vaccine uptake among migrants and mobility of elites.

The 5th BBinar discussed what role the social investment approach to social welfare policies can and should play in supporting sustainable development in the Western Balkan and the Eastern Partnership countries.

This international seminar presents a study that sets out to break through the existing thought boundaries of so many, by looking at all European welfare states in all of Europe, in the broadest sense.

The 4^th BBinar discussed progress and challenges of developing accessible, affordable, and high-quality care for older adults as one way to improve gender equality in Western Balkan countries.

We present a comprehensive study on posting to and from Austria conducted in the frame of the Posting.STAT project.

The working conditions of platform workers are a much discussed topic, not least due to the strong growth of food delivery services in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Against this backdrop, the European Center conducted a survey of over 300 food delivery riders that was funded by the Work 4.0 Digitization Fund of the Vienna Chamber of Labour.

The 3rd BBinar will discuss models, progress, challenges, and ways forward for the development of the family type cares services for children in Western Balkans with country examples from Croatia, North Macedonia, and Albania.

The aim of this webinar is to offer research staff and students of the Central European University, European Centre colleagues and a wider audience, especially interested in the topic of ageing and its implications across the EU to exchange at a practical level about common challenges and necessary policy developments that will ensure sustainability.

Aim of the workshop to explore and discuss the results from the analysis and focus groups at comparative level & to disseminate and share findings within the consortium and beyond.

This presentation will draw on findings from the first wave of a longitudinal survey as part of the Retention and Sustainability of Social Care Workforce (RESSCW) project.

At the second BBinar experts discussed the impact of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic on social care provision for older people, persons with disabilities and other groups with support needs in the Eastern Partnership region, and beyond.

The first BBinar will discuss the performance of countries in the Western Balkan region on issues covered under the European Pillar of Social Rights.

The European Centre is launching BBinars, a series of webinars, on social policies in Eastern Europe. The aim of this series of webinars is to offer members of the Eastern European Social Policy Network (EESPN), European Centre colleagues and a wider audience, especially interested in the Western Balkans and the Eastern Partnership region a possibility to exchange and learn among peers.

The presentation aims at clarifying how school-to-work transitions might be addressed considering different types of complementarities and the related structuring process they exert on youth.

The POW-BRIDGE (Bridging the gap between legislation and practice in the posting of workers) consortium is pleased to invite you to attend the project’s Final Conference, taking place on 9th November (9.00-13.30 CET) on the ZOOM platform.

What are the net inter-age group resource transfer burdens over the life course carried by working-age parents as compared to non-parents in Europe? Prof. Pieter Vanhuysse estimates all cash, in-kind, and time transfers of the market economy and the household economy, through both public and familial channels, for fourteen countries in the early 2000s.

Two BB Summer Schools of evaluation in social policies took place online on 25-27 August and 22-24 September 2021 aiming to enhance skills and knowledge in commissioning and/or conducting social policy-oriented M&E projects and programmes. 

In this Jour Fixe, Günter Stummvoll will discuss the social policy implications of interdisciplinary collaboration between law enforcement agencies and social support services.

Birgit Riedel’s team empirically studied the new agents and policy articulation in childcare at a local level.

In this presentation, Norah Keating talked about how the unfolding of life courses of family carers might contribute to this larger agenda and to the mission of the Sustainable Development Goals to leave no one behind.

The aim of this presentation was threefold: informative, reflexive, and provide food for thought for policy makers.

The Con3Post Conference brings together researchers from five European countries (Slovenia, Austria, Italy, Finland and Poland) to present and discuss the findings of the empirical research on posting of third country nationals.

This expert workshop in German language served to exchange experiences regarding the quality assurance of agencies working in the recruitment of health and care workers as well as of personal carers in Austria and Germany. 

Our intern Maria Varlamova presents her PhD project on “Ageism in the workforce: the employers’ perspective”. The theoretical model, challenges of data collection and required project modifications regarding the COVID-19 pandemic will be presented.

Using a political institutionalist framework and based on a new comparative qualitative dataset, a critical cases analysis by Rafael Labanino follows the politics of unemployment and pension reform processes in Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia and Poland.

SWaPOL is an education & training project to develop a common vocational training for social workers and police prevention officers. The Austrian team of the project organises a Multiplier Event targeting responsible persons from Social Work and the Police.

The General Assembly Meeting 2020 of the European Centre was dedicated to social policy and research in the time of COVID-19 and beyond.

Veronica Sandu and Magdi Birtha planned to present their initial conceptual framework for a tool to collect and assess good practices of non-residential support services for older people with long-term care needs.

At this event, we aimed to discuss why a human rights-based approach is needed in long-term care policies across the EU. Due to the restrictive measures related to COVID-19, our event had to be postponed to a later date this year.

Gülin Öylü presented her findings on late working life patterns in Sweden as part of her larger research study on age discrimination in late working life in Sweden.

Michael Fuchs and Tamara Premrov investigated whether the reform 2010/11 replacing monetary social assistance by minimum income benefit was successful regarding the access to the benefit.

The Ministry of Social Affairs, Health, Care and Consumer Protection, the government of Salzburg and the European Centre organised a multi-stakeholder workshop on the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to reduce poverty and inequality.

In the first session of the Jour Fixe, Sonila Danaj discussed findings of the Posting of Workers in the Western Balkans project. The presentation focused on the transposition of the Posting of Workers Directive in the four candidate countries of the Western Balkans.

Experts from German and Austrian ministries and local administrations with responsibilities for long-term care, researchers and other relevant stakeholders exchanged experiences and models on information, counselling and coordination in long-term care.

The European Centre and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs, Health and Consumer Protection (BMASGK) jointly organised a workshop on the implementation of the SDGs under the title ‘A Society for People of All Ages’.

The General Assembly Meeting 2019 of the European Centre was dedicated to its contributions in achieving the UN SDGs. Challenges, research results and policy recommendations were presented to the Board of Directors, National Liaison Officials and observers.

The European Centre invites for the International Workshop 'SDGs priorities & challenges in social welfare policy in Eastern Partnership countries' in Vienna, on 14 & 15 Octobre 2019.

The European Centre organised a seminar on the future of posting. It focused on the persistent and under-researched trend of recruiting and posting of third-country nationals to work in the single European market.

In this seminar, Tim Huijts presented data on patterns of social inequality in health in Europe, drawing on a recent European Social Survey module on social determinants of health and on findings from the NORFACE-funded HiNews project.

This presentation discussed the feasibility of Universal Basic Income (UBI) proposals in the Western Balkans, drawing on local initiatives and current welfare provisions in the ground.

The Ministry of Social Affairs, Health, Care and Consumer Protection, the European Centre and the Johannes Kepler University Linz organised a multi-stakeholder workshop on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as regards decent work for young people.

The analysis utilised micro data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to compare performance-tested outcomes of mobility and memory with their self-reported equivalents of the population 50+ in 19 European countries.

The Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs, Health and Consumer Protection, the European Centre and the Johannes Kepler University Linz organised a multi-stakeholder workshop on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for people with disabilities in Austria.

Social circumstances are among the strongest determinants of health. There is a gender paradox, however. Greater wealth brings greater health.

Many truck drivers lost their job in Belgium over the last decade. The presentation explained the methodology to investigate wage dumping in the transport sector, with a focus on Slovakia.

This presentation discussed and documented the policy relevance of long-term care (LTC) insurance by offering novel insights as to the institutional arrangements prevailing in Europe.

The 7th Event of the Vienna Evaluation Network evolved around three key questions: Which learning formats exist in the context of evaluations? When and at which point of the evaluation process do we best learn from evaluations? Who learns from evaluations?

The presentation focused on lessons learned from more than 15 years of field surveys on migrants and similarly hard-to-reach populations carried out using alternative methods.

The 6th Event of the Vienna Evaluation Network explored how to transfer findings from evaluation studies and how to identify factors to determine the circumstances under which evidence transfer may be appropriate.

The Vienna EUROMOD Workshop comprised sessions on tax-benefit microsimulation in Austria, the Western BalkanMod initiative of the Eastern European Social Policy Network, and new research directions using EUROMOD.

The presentation reviewed guiding principles of the life course paradigm and discussed how existing methodology implements them in empirical research.

The Netherlands’ government has taken measures to improve the performance and sustainability of its long-term care system. Henk Nies provided an overview of the implementation of the reforms as well as insights into the new policy instruments.

This expert workshop served to present regulatory measures in the area of live-in migrant care in Austria (24-hour care) and to discuss potentials to transfer and adapt these to German legislation.

With theory-based evaluation, evaluators are expected to work on the basis of a programme theory and verify the different causal links. The presentation illustrated how programme theory can be used for planning, managing, monitoring and evaluation

The European Centre organized this workshop on ‘Bridge Building in Social Welfare Policy’ for its National Liaison Officials to strengthen and encourage regional and project cooperation in social welfare policy and research.

Monitoring and enforcement of posted workers’ rights is problematic in many respects. One major contributing factor is that posted workers’ employment contracts fall under multiple overlapping jurisdictions.

A Macedonian delegation comprising experts from public authorities and NGOs visited the European Centre on 22 November 2017 to exchange knowledge on social policies.

The Forum discussed: How can social policies best contribute to more distributive justice? Which strategies are the most promising in the various European regions? How can governments and research from the East and the West contribute to a social and cohesive Europe?

The Summer School contributed to more European cohesion by building capacities of stakeholders across sectors and countries, providing training on innovative approaches, good practices and up-to-date research results, as well as joint development of projects.

The presentation discussed trends in cross-border mobility of health professionals and their effects for parients, care professionals and the care systems of sending and receiving countries.

The analysis examined the interrelated effects of migration backgrounds and skill levels as an indicator for social class in this female-dominated work field.

Relevant stakeholders were invited to exchange information and experiences related to new developments and recent reforms in long-term care in Austria and Germany, with a special focus on dementia strategies and measures to support informal carers.

Against the background of an increase in longevity, the presentation discussed how disadvantages experienced throughout the life-course are associated with the likelihood of reaching old age as well as with health during old age.

The presentation analysed the impact of the labour market context and social policy arrangements on the gender employment gap in Central and Eastern Europe.

Starting from an ideal concept of care, new forms of communal care beyond the market logic of individualization and choice were explored. Policy changes were examined to identify possible logics and practices of marketization and commodification.

The General Assembly Meeting is the annual meeting of Board Members, NLOs, EC staff and observers. The management report as well as thematic sessions with transversal papers informed about last year’s work done by the European Centre.

The European Centre’s ‘Bridging Function’ is based on the premise of close collaboration with the national governments of European countries, the European Union and other relevant stakeholders at the international, European and national level.

One of the key questions asked in the migration debate is: Do migrants take our jobs and welfare? Many key actors have been confused as regards the role of labour mobility for European societies and economies.

Workplace Innovation (WPI) seeks to link with the broader notion of social innovation: What is ‘social’ about WPI and in what way does it address ‘social issues’?

Long-term care is likely to become increasingly variable across the UK, dependent on local political priorities and discretionary decision-making. The seminar dealt with the longer-term implications of current policies.

The presentation discussed the ‘care deficit’ issue in European societies using as dependent variables quantity and quality of care and working conditions of carers and the institutional and socio-economic contexts.

Europeanization as a society-wide process can explain why actors such as the European Commission have been able to enforce their aims easy and fast, while collective actors are able to challenge European wage-policies only under certain conditions.

This seminar outlined what we know about how well health and care systems currently serve people with dementia, and which strategies seem to be the most effective in improving this.

This presentation outlined the approach for developing and implementing this web-based tool, its main characteristics and its capability to provide specific outcomes of value to the developers of an intervention.

This presentation considers the impacts of these changes before setting out measures that social security systems need to consider and adopt, in order to address, mitigate and influence the negative effects. A number of examples of practical and effective measures that social security institutions have taken are highlighted.

Based on electoral studies and original survey evidence, I analyse temporary workers’ social policy preferences and the conditions under which these preferences are translated into voting behaviour.

In contrast, when the deservingness heuristic is utilized for reasoning about unemployment benefits, implicit psychological constraints are fewer and political conflict erupts depending on differences in interest and worldviews. Using a variety of methodologies, we track this fundamental difference between health care and unemployment benefits from the level of implicit processing to the development of social policies.

The presentation explores patterns of employment in social services and the public sector in different EU member states in the broader context of labour market and welfare state development. The analysis shows how EU countries pursue their fiscal policies in social services, how they develop modes of governance and the change in the public/private mix in social services, and what new patterns of employment in social services are seen in light of the challenges for welfare states both due to recent fiscal pressures as well as expected demographic changes

The General Assembly Meeting is the annual meeting of Board members, NLO, EC staff and observers. The management report by the Executive Director and thematic sessions with transversal papers written by staff members and commented by NLO inform about the last year's work done by the EC. Moreover they highlight possibilities for further activities.

On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, the European Centre organises a Symposium on 'The Future of Welfare in a Global Europe', in Vienna on 15 September.

The aim of this lecture is to outline an agenda for a comparative analysis of the warfare -welfare state nexus. By distinguishing between three different phases (war preparation, warfare, and post-war period) it provides an overview of possible causal mechanisms linking war and the welfare state and provides preliminary empirical evidence for war waging, occupied and neutral countries in the age of mass warfare stretching from ca. the 1860s to the 1960s.

The ‘social question’ dominating the end of the 19th century was the integration of the industrial workers, in other words, the pacification of class conflict. At the beginning of the 21st century, class conflict seems to be defunct and its place taken over by generational conflict. It emerges from historical watersheds and from economic, demographic and cultural changes that create cleavages between generations.

Social security policies and instruments are seen as parts of a wider social setting providing a (more or less) stable and viable socio-political and socio-economic context for citizens’ lives (‘system-security’). The interesting empirical questions this perspective leads to are twofold. Firstly, how secure do people actually feel when it comes to their socio-economic status? And secondly, to what degree do social security policies and instruments positively affect such feelings?

This talk discusses the reasons for this exceptionally moderate role of Austrian employers. I suggest that the institutional setup of interest representation in Austria explains this stance better than alternative explanations that focus on competitive advantages. These institutional features are compulsory membership, equal voting rights and encompassing organization.

The first part of the presentation explains the emergence of these development paths by highlighting the role of partisan politics in interaction with different institutional contexts. The second part discusses how educational institutions affect contemporary patterns of social inequality and popular attitudes towards education policy and the welfare state.

This paper argues that the recent reversals in pension privatization hold interesting lessons for the research on international policy diffusion.

Our research experimentally studies the causal effect of the association (congruent/incongruent) between policymakers and policies on the level of responsibility attributed to their adverse consequences. Our analyses rely on two survey experiments, conducted in Israel and Germany. Both experiments support our hypothesis.

The General Assembly Meeting is the annual meeting of Board members, NLO, EC staff and observers. The management report by the Executive Director and thematic sessions with transversal papers written by staff members and commented by NLO inform about the last year's work done by the EC. Moreover they highlight possibilities for further activities.

After picturing the Austrian school today, the presentation shortly describes the ideal school of tomorrow. To illustrate, how it can be realized the TALK program and its evaluation results are briefly presented. TALK is a training program for teachers to enhance LLL. Finally, challenges for politics and society are discussed.

In context with the project AGORA, the research team at the European Centre together with the FH St. Pölten and the FH Campus Wien organized a one-day international workshop. The workshop attracted more than 100 participants from target organisations such as the police, mobile social work, social science, administration and policy.

As we focus on post-tax, post-transfer income, which can be influenced by social policy, we show how different countries gave diverging answers to the general economic slowdown of the post 1970 era. While the US and Germany did not obviously burden some birth cohorts more than others, when economic problems started to arise in the 1970s, the burden of adjustment to more difficult conditions fell disproportionately on the shoulders of post-1950 birth cohorts in France, leading to strong inequalities between cohorts.

We conducted interviews with over 200 families in Sweden, Norway, the Czech Republic and Slovakia about how they made their caring decisions for their children under 3. The idea was to try and ascertain what possible effects culture and institutions have on caring choices at the micro level.

In this presentation I discuss, how pay-as-you-go pension systems can be designed such that they remain financially stable in the presence of increasing life expectancy. I will particularly focus on the notional defined contribution (NDC) type that has become quite prominent over the recent decades and is used in an increasing number of countries (starting with Sweden). I will contrast the main properties of the NDC system (a “contribution based account system”) with the working of the Austrian APG (a “benefit based account system”).

The seminar described the development of within country income inequalities in 30 countries between 1980 and 2010.

While concerns about the adverse effects of mental ill-health are rising in most OECD countries and recognised as one of today’s biggest challenges for social and labour market policy, problems are far from being understood or yet addressed comprehensively and sufficiently. Rising unemployment in many OECD countries in the course of the recent jobs crisis has potentially increased the problem.

We construct an old age dependency ratio (OADR) where we assign to each person a number of units corresponding to his/her level of human capital.

Bernd Marin and Asghar Zaidi presented findings of the Active Ageing Index (AAI) project. The index measures different dimensions of active ageing and quantify untapped active ageing potentials for each country, thus showing how much progress could still be made.

How and in which direction should long-term care services and facilities be further developed in the Slovak Republic? These and related issues were tackled during a high-level policy seminar with experts from the administration of Slovakia and the Worldbank on 11 December 2012 in Bratislava. The Ministry of Health is in the process of defining its medium term strategy for health and is currently assessing the performance of the health system, the main challenges and how to address these in the future.

On Wednesday 5 December, Professor Frank Vandenbroucke (Universities of Amsterdam, Antwerp and Leuven), who as Belgian Federal Minister has been one of the driving forces behind the EU Lisbon Agenda, presented his vision for a social Europe for today and tomorrow in front of a packed seminar room at the European Centre.

In the last 30 years, since the first conference on ageing in Vienna in 1982, the debate on ageing has evolved considerably, and so has the proportion and status of elderly people both in industrialized and developing countries.While ageing is often seen as a problem, recent trends tend to place the debate on longevity on another level, i.e. that of the development of a long-life society.

More information coming soon...

In this lecture, social policy is used as a prism for state analysis. The provisions contained in the Chinese welfare state as it stands today and is evolving will be reviewed, up against the main theories of welfare state typologies.

The lecture examined a newly emerging model of intergenerational relationships that takes as its starting point the degree to which it is possible to place oneself in the position of a person of another age, the ‘age-other’. It explored an experiential approach that draws on both sociological thinking on ‘generational consciousness’ and a debate in family gerontology on the relationships between conflict, solidarity and ambivalence.

The General Assembly Meeting is the annual meeting of Board members, NLO, EC staff and observers. The management report by the Executive Director and thematic sessions with transversal papers written by staff members and commented by NLO inform about the last year's work done by the EC.