Together with its partner from the Austrian Institue for Family Studies at the University of Vienna and individual family policy experts such as Mary Daly (University of Oxford) and Tatiana Rakar (Slovenian Social Protection Institute), the European Centre has won a bid for research funding from the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, for a project entitled ‘Families in the Economic Crisis: Mapping Policy Responses in 10 European Member States’.The Centre will mainly take charge of tasks 3 and 8 within this project.

The European Centre analysed minimum income regulations in selected European countries.

Against this background the project sets up corridor studies as an instrument of knowledge gathering and result analysis.The two bilateral social security agreements between Austria/Turkey and Germany/Turkey may bring substantial experiences, as they have existed for many years in migration intensive corridors.

In the wake of the economic and financial crisis, public spending cuts on healthcare services have been widespread, with important consequences for access to care and potentially on population health. Funded by Eurofound, this project seeks to examine how access to healthcare has evolved as a result of the crisis, and in particular which groups within the population have been disproportionately affected.

The project aims to identify patterns of use of care in Vienna based on a series of different assumptions on future developments in the long-term care sector. For that purpose, a number of factors for which data are available are being analyzed.These include information about the type and hours of care used, health status (e.g. level of care need), socio-demographic information (e.g. age, gender), information about socio-economic status (e.g. personal income, district of resi- dence), and contextual factors (e.g. household size, informal carers).