Katrin Gasior

Population Aging and Intergenerational Solidarity: International Policy Frameworks and European Public Opinion

The population aging challenges facing the European Union countries have been articulated in two ways: the financial sustainability of public welfare systems and the adequacy of retirement incomes and social services. The ideas underlying social sustainability, though less clearly defined, encompass not just both of these challenges but also address the need to ensure intergenerational solidarity, formally or informally, in countries experiencing aging populations. This paper identifies policy challenges put forward by the United Nations and by the European Union regarding that need while also reporting on the opinions of European citizens on various aspects of intergenerational solidarity.

Measuring active and healthy ageing in Europe

The active and healthy ageing measure reported here is calculated for the 28 European Union countries, with a specific focus on the current generation of older people and by using the latest data from multiple surveys. It covers diverse aspects of active and healthy ageing, by measuring older people’s contribution with respect to not just employment but also their unpaid familial, social and cultural contributions and their independent, healthy and secure living. The article presents the first-of-its-kind quantitative measure of active and healthy ageing in the literature on active and healthy ageing which hitherto has focused largely on concepts, definitions and public policy strategies. In this pursuit, an important contribution of this measure, referred to as the Active Ageing Index (‘AAI’), is that it also captures how countries differ with respect to capacity and enabling environments for active and healthy ageing. The AAI offers a breakdown not just by four domains of active and healthy ageing but also by gender. Key findings are that Sweden comes at the top of the country ranking, followed closely by Denmark, the United Kingdom, Finland, the Netherlands and Ireland. The four southern European countries (Italy, Portugal, Spain and Malta) are middle-ranked countries. Greece and many of the Central European countries are at the bottom, highlighting much greater untapped potentials of active and healthy ageing among older people in these countries and a need for greater policy efforts. Women fare worse than men in most countries, identifying a need for an emphasis on reducing gender disparity in experiences of active and healthy ageing. The AAI tool developed has the potential to identify the social policy mechanisms behind the differential achievements of active and healthy ageing, for example, what active and healthy ageing strategies have driven top performers, and in what respect the bottom-ranked countries have lagged behind.

Income Poverty in the EU: What Do We Actually Measure? Empirical Evidence on Choices, Underlying Assumptions and Implications (Based on EU-SILC 2005–2014)

Social exclusion and poverty highlight one particular aspect of social inequality, focusing on the situation of those who are at the bottom. In this chapter, we focus only on poverty and the specific indicators used for monitoring poverty at the EU level. We highlight the methodological and normative assumptions beyond the ‘lead’ indicator of poverty and show the actual empirical implications of these. What is the significance of the specific poverty threshold chosen? What does it imply for cross-country comparison? We discuss the issue of poverty monitoring over time and make a case for the use of the poverty rate with a threshold ‘anchored in time’, and demonstrate the significance of this choice with country-specific evidence. Our chapter concludes with data on the situation of migrants, indicating that social disparities within a particular country are of specific relevance in the use of this indicator (given its country-specific definition of poverty threshold as such). The analysis is based on EU-SILC data from the years 2005–2014, which provides cross-country comparative data for all EU countries.