Over the past year, the European Centre organised five international Seminars to launch and discuss the book A Research Agenda for Ageing and Social Policy, edited by Kai Leichsenring and Alexandre Sidorenko. To conclude this series, we wanted to examine the changing national and international contexts and potential next steps with authors and other stakeholders for research on ageing.

In our series of international seminars, in this face-to-face event the main results of the project „The effect of COVID-19 on poverty and material deprivation of children in Austria“, funded by the Jubiläumsfonds of the Austrian National Bank (project number 18785), will be presented and discussed.

In our series of international seminars discussing ‘A Research Agenda for Ageing and Social Policy’, this online event highlighted another two key issues of ageing and social policy - on the one hand, the myth of the demographic deficit was challenged by Sarah Harper and Yanan Zhang, on the other hand, Giovanni Lamura and Henk Nies highlighted the research needs in the area of long-term care. 

In our series of international seminars discussing ‘A Research Agenda for Ageing and Social Policy‘ this online event highlighted another two key issues of ageing and social policy - the ageing workforce in times of digitalization and shifting social relations and family patterns connected to population ageing.

In our series of international seminars discussing ‘A Research Agenda for Ageing and Social Policy‘ this online event highlighted two key issues of ageing and social policy - combating ageism and promoting active ageing. Clemens Tesch-Römer and Liat Ayalon presented cultural and societal patterns of age-related discrimination and their impact on social and public policies, and they proposed research to expand the evidence base. Oxana Sinyavskaya then followed 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 revealed 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.