This report investigates regulations for the provision of informal care in 21 member states of the European Union. We focus on the comparison of public support for informal care, and compare in detail the monetary benefits that can be used to finance informal care. Additionally, we use SHARE data to compare characteristics of informal carers in a subset of countries, looking at how much care and what kind of care is being provided, and the relationship between the carer and the care recipient.

This research report is concerned with the analysis of the supply of informal care provided by family and friends in Europe, and forms part of the Assessing Needs of Care in European Nations (ANCIEN) research project. The research uses multivariate analysis of the provision of informal help with personal care tasks in Europe, taking into account socio-demographic factors likely to affect the provision of informal care, including gender, age, marital status and education, and also taking into account differences in long-term systems.

This ANCIEN project research report provides a comparative analysis of the size and composition of the long-term care (LTC) workforce in four European countries – Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Poland – each representative of a different type of LTC system. Trends over the 1993-2008 period show substantial differences in care worker density, with the Netherlands continuing to have the highest number of care workers relative to its older population.

This report summarizes the main results of Work Package 1 of the research project ‘Assessing Needs of Care in European Nations’ (ANCIEN).
This report aims at contributing to knowledge on long-tem care (LTC) system design features by developing a typology of LTC system models in EU countries, which are characterized by diverse arrangements for the provision of care/organization and financing. Its approach deviates from existing typologies in a number of ways:

The social dimension of the internal market has been a theme for debate ever since 1987, when Jacques Delors introduced it as a counterbalance to the emerging ‘Europhoria’ of European business about the EC-1992 single market programme.

The financial crisis had a significant impact on the levels of trust that citizens place in the system and its institutions. Recent data from Eurobarometer show a significant fall in confidence on the part of European citizens in the EU’s institutions. For the first time since its creation, a majority of European citizens no longer trust the European Central Bank. However, confidence levels in national governments have actually risen, supporting a contrasting trend between confidence levels in European and national institutions.

The aim of this paper is to develop indicators to highlight the ability of different national pension systems to enable individuals to maintain their living standards at retirement. Authors Margherita Borella and Elsa Fornero of the University of Turin and CeRP, perform the analysis using data and projections on different European countries and propose the use of a ‘COmprehensive Replacement’ (CORE) rate.

This paper focuses on retirement behaviour in Poland, especially early withdrawal from the labour market. It shows that retirement ages are very low, which can be attributed to the current regulations of the old-age pension system, as well as other pre-retirement transfers. The age of retirement is closely related to the legal framework of the pension system and changes that can be observed follow changes in legal regulations.

This paper starts by describing the model MIDAS in detail. It next presents and discusses some simulation results for Belgium, Germany and Italy. Finally, the simulation results of two alternative policy scenarios are presented and discussed.

REVISED VERSION

To what extent is the financial position of the elderly in the NMS more vulnerable than that of the old member states (or the EU-15), due to a rather unfavourable starting point and the possible impact of pension reforms? This is the main issue of the current research report. It tries to delineate the vulnerability of the income position of elderly people in the NMS, in relation to the demographic, socio-economic and institutional context of these countries. More specifically, the report focuses on:

This paper analyses old-age retirement decisions of Slovenian men and women eligible to retire in the period 1997-2003. In addition to established market economies, relatively high hazard rates of retirement are found, which decline with age. This peculiar pattern can be partly attributed to weak incentives to work inherent in the design of social security and is reflected in predominantly negative values of accruals and to transition-specific increases in wage inequality in the late 1980 and early 1990s.

Globalisation is more an opportunity than a menace and the European social model is not doomed. Globalisation is not a zero-sum game but there are undeniably adverse consequences. As a phenomenon of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, there can be little doubt that globalisation is something that resonates widely. But it is not easy to pin down conceptually or empirically. In fact, many of the fears surrounding globalisation are greatly exaggerated and even where justified tend to rest on an incomplete analysis of the process.

This report presents an empirical typology of pension regimes in the European Union, the US, Canada, Australia and Norway. The categorisation is based on 34 quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the mandatory parts of the pension systems in these countries. The empirical analysis shows that Esping-Andersen’s classical distinction between liberal, corporatist and social-democratic welfare regime types does not entirely hold in the case of pension systems.