Panel Discussion at ZEW on Demographic Change – "Healthy Ageing" Represents a Challenge for the Economy and Society

Demographic change is an interdisciplinary phenomenon. Germany’s increasingly ageing population is not only a test for the country as a business location, but is also challenging researchers to develop strategies and solutions to deal with this problem. How to successfully tackle the issue of Germany’s ageing population is the subject of a panel discussion being held at 6.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 25 February 2015 at the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim.

Highly industrialised countries are now faced with the challenge of supporting their populations financially as they enter old age free from disease and other physical limitations, a phenomenon known as “healthy ageing”. At the same, demographic change has long been a prominent social issue and is raising many questions, such as:

How can we maintain the cognitive abilities of older employees? How can biomedical techniques be used to improve the health and quality of life of senior systems and thus decrease the burden on the social security system. The panel discussion on “The Effects of Demographic Change on Public Health, the Economy and Society” will get to the bottom of these issues as part of the two-day symposium “Better understanding healthy ageing: A trans- and interdisciplinary approach” held by the Leibniz Research Alliance on Healthy Ageing at ZEW. The event will kick-off with welcoming addresses from ZEW President Professor Clemens Fuest and Professor Matthias Kleiner, President of the Leibniz Association. Participating in the panel discussion will be:

• Professor K. Lenhard Rudolph, Leibniz Institute on Ageing – Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI), Jena
• Professor Jean Krutmann, Leibniz Research Institute for Environmental Medicine (IUF), Düsseldorf
• Professor Michael Falkenstein, Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors at TU Dortmund
• Professor Björn Schumacher, CECAD Research Centre on Ageing, Cologne
• Dr. Alexander Spermann, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

The debate will be moderated by Professor Holger Bonin, head of the ZEW Research Department “Labour Markets, Human Resources and Social Policy”.