EUROPEAN PAPERS ON THE NEW WELFARE

Content summary

Editorial
Orio Giarini

Generation30 — The Present and future of young people in the long-life society
Beatriz Fernandez and Gordon Henrik Wollgam

Technological Changes, the Reversal of Age Pyramids and the Future of Retirement Systems
Yehuda Kahane

Sustainable Development and Quality of Life in the Ageing Societies
Aleksander Zidanšek

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1. Introduction

Though a country in transition, Romania already faces the same problems as the developed countries: the ageing of the population, a low fertility rate and a long period of transition from a state controlled economy to a market economy. The ratio of beneficiaries, including the farmers, to contributors is almost 100%, similar with developed countries.
In 1989, the year when Romanians threw out the Ceausescu communist regime, Romania had a PAYG pension system which covered all the employees.
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1. Introduction

Pension systems constitute the key element of modern welfare states. They epitomise current dilemmas of social policy — what kind of balance between public, private and voluntary sectors should be struck? How should demographic challenges of contemporary Western societies be dealt with? Considering the increasingly competitive environment of today’s global market is there a place for the comprehensive publicly managed and publicly provided pension benefits? What role should the European Union play in the field of pensions? Is the Anglo-American pension model on the rise?
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1. Introduction

Throughout the European Union there is a general crisis of the welfare state, a phenomenon which is seen by many as a very real change of identity for the traditional paradigm of the Social State, leading to a new balance. Europe has very low birth rates and society’s ageing process imposes the need for urgent measures for confronting what in the next decades could prove to be unsustainable problems for national states: the health-welfare service, and social security. Private operators must be brought into this context, particularly the insurance companies who — as suppliers of services — will gradually take on an ever more active role in the forming of a system which will be capable of guaranteeing adequate levels of protection, security and wellbeing. Besides a great sense of responsibility, the handling of this change will require from the insurance companies a clear awareness of the framework within which they will be called to work. This is the matter to which I direct this paper.
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1. Introduction

Reforming pensions is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. All OECD countries have to adjust to the ageing of their populations and re-balance retirement income provision to keep it adequate and ensure that the system is financially sustainable.
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1. General premises of our common concerns

The crisis of present-day educational systems, of labour markets and of world political systems, is a real and worrying pressure of societies on the organisation and contents of higher education itself.
It is important to notice that concerns referred to the contents and organisation of present-day educational systems, exists all over European countries, in the spite of the fact that it is based on backgrounds of significantly different experiences and countries’ history. We can see for instance that, while governments are increasingly preoccupied with the chronic disease of unemployment, companies have recently become very actively involved in educational processes by recycling the workforce and sponsoring computer-aided education.
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1. Introduction

The demographic changes in the developed countries, which is leading to the so called ‘inversion of the demographic triangle’, will have a most dramatic impact on these societies. An increasing number of older citizens, with reduced physical and mental abilities and most often also with chronic and degenerative diseases, will need support in order to remain independent and ‘age in place’ in their homes. Independent living is an important target not only because it usually represents a strong wish of the older person, who wants to maintain a good quality of life, but also because it reduces the burden on hospitals and long term care facilities, which represent expensive care settings. ‘Ageing in place’ is an important element of a new strategy for increasing the quality of healthcare while keeping costs under control: moving from what Andy Grove, Chairman of Intel Corp., calls the ‘mainframe age’ of healthcare to a more distributed model, where each single house becomes a setting for preventing or managing diseases.
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1. Introduction

Studies carried out in the last 25 years have shown that the theoretical maximal lifespan of a given species, 120 years for humans, is strongly correlated with its brain/body size ratio. This is particularly true in mammals, with the exception of bats which, on average, live three times longer than predicted by their brain and body size¹. From these comparative anatomical studies the new concept has emerged, that lifespan is largely controlled by the brain. Evolutionary theories provide the key to understand how brain may control lifespan. According to this view, during evolution the control of the body metabolism (including control of energy storage in fat and active research for new energy, i.e. food), has been located in the brain which, as a consequence, has assumed the control of the entire body’s health and resistance to life stresses. Read More

1. Introduction

The 2005 White House Conference on Ageing is scheduled for December in Washington, D.C. This once-a-decade Conference will be the fifth in the series dating from 1961. While past Conferences had all dealt with numerous issues as they should, each Conference had its major focus — for example, health care in 1961, income maintenance in 1971, and social security in 1981. What should be the major focus of the 2005 Conference? I nominate long-term care, despite the fact that social security reform has dominated discussions of domestic policy this year.
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1. Introduction

The modern world, for all the great advances in most parts of our lives, has created a surprising conundrum: Bismarck’s pension trap. A system to provide old-age security based on an inadequate if not increasingly meaningless measure, the chronological age of the person. Which, to make matters worse, has been kept constant for more than 100 years.
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