Individual and Population Ageing

Population ageing is – similar to climate change – one of the grand challenges of this century. Ageing strains pension and healthcare financing, stresses intergenerational relations and may endanger economic growth. Designing effective policies to turn these challenges into chances requires understanding the underlying mechanisms. As in climate change, this requires an infrastructure of suitable data that can shed light on how economic, social and health policies have worked -- or not worked -- in the past. The combination of time series with internationally comparitive data is particularly powerful in this respect. The speaker will provide concrete examples based on the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) which describe international differences in coping with individual and population ageing, and compare economic, social and health policies across 27 European countries and Israel.