User Rating: 3 / 5

Olivier Bontout and Georg Fischer
Directorate General for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities
European Commission
Updated for the 9th Annual Joint Conference of the Retirement Research Consortium
“Challenges and Solutions for Retirement Security”
Washington, D.C., 9-10 August 2007.

The nature of the pension challenge is not only about demographic trends. It is also about changes in society and in the labour market. Results from the European process of open coordination in the area of pensions enable to characterise the main features of ongoing pension reforms. Ongoing changes in the labour market and projected impacts of reforms on adequacy and sustainability are essential to monitor. The reforms now seem to focus on a few outstanding issues .

Attachments:

PENSIONS.pdf

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User Rating: 3 / 5

European Commission
Directorate-General for Regional Policy, 2007

Initially, discussion around the ageing trend was concentrated on the sustainability of social security, pensions and health policies. However, it is increasingly recognised that an ageing population will require the adaptation of practically all major public policies, including education, employment and social aff airs, transport, public services and infrastructures and urban planning, to address ageing and exploit the opportunities it presents. The Lisbon Strategy up to 2010 takes the broad European demographic trends into account. Indeed, those trends reinforce the essential objective of seeking to improve EU competitiveness by raising overall employment rates and employment rates of women and older workers, and by promoting innovation and higher-value-added economic activities in order to raise productivity.

Attachments:

demochallenge_en.pdf

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User Rating: 3 / 5

European Commission, 2005

The Commission's Green Paper presents the various challenges that the EU has to confront to reverse demographic decline and the weak natural population increase. It considers that to meet this challenge, the Lisbon Agenda must be resolutely implemented, in particular those policies focusing on getting people into jobs, on innovation and increasing productivity. It is also urgent to put in place birth-friendly policies and to address the possible contribution of immigration in a balanced way. The Green Paper stresses that it is also necessary to continue modernising social protection systems, especially pensions, to ensure their social and economic sustainability and to enable them to cope with the effects of demographic ageing.

Attachments:

GreenPaper.pdf

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DIALOG project
Federal Institute for Population Research, 2005.

In the framework of the PPAS, people in 14 european countries were asked about their opinions on family and family policy, on desired fertility and the circumstances opposing its realisation, about the role played by elderly people in our societies and the expectations of successful policy on the elderly, on living together as partners in various living arrangements, and on policies promoting gender equity and on the reconciliation of family and gainful employment. The team of researchers of the Population Policy Acceptance Study, wish to inform the public and politicians of what Europeans think about demographic change and of their expectations as to the features of population-relevant policies.

Attachments:

PPAS_en.pdf

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Jemima Repo
University of Helsinki, 2009

This paper compares gender equality discourse in demographic planning in Japan and the European Union. Since the falling birth rate became a prime political problem in Japan in the early 1990s, the Japanese government has introduced a series of policies and established new institutions with which to tackle it. In the late 1990s, “gender equality” became the centre of Japan’s demographic strategy. One of the first to employ a “gender equality” discourse to tackle demographic decline, however, was the EU in the 1970s, from which Japanese policies appear to draw. The continuing fall in birth rates in EU member states have led to new shifts in gender equality discourse in the 1990s and 2000s. They contrast starkly with the state of gender equality in Japan, where for example, gender mainstreaming remains marginal and issues of diversity are altogether absent. A comparison of current gender equality discourse in demographic context in Japan and the EU sheds light first, on the international mechanisms involved in shaping gender equality discourse; second, on the specificities of its localisation in the Japanese context; and third, on how different discursive approaches to falling birth rates result in different discourses of gender equality.

Attachments:

Demographic_policy.pdf

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Geoffrey McNicoll
The Population Council, 2006

The usual lessons drawn from East Asia's striking experience of health and fertility transition concern the efficacy of well-designed government programs catering to an existing or ideationally stimulated demand. An alternative interpretation sees the demographic change—and the uptake of services—as a byproduct of social and economic development together with, in some cases, strong government pressures. This paper probes more deeply into this experience, seeking to identify common features of development design and administration that underlay it and to derive lessons for policies elsewhere. The broad sequence entailed, initially, establishment of an effective, typically authoritarian, system of local administration, providing (sometimes incidentally) a framework for promotion and service delivery in health, education, and family planning. Subsequent economic liberalization offered new opportunities for upward mobility—and greater risks of backsliding—but along with erosion of social capital and the breakdown or privatization of service programs. The study is mainly focused on seven countries: Taiwan and South Korea ("tiger" economies), Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia ("second wave" countries), and China and Vietnam ("market-Leninist" economies). The period is roughly from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Attachments:

Policy_lessons_East_Asia.pdf

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