1.1 Introduction
An active and healthy life remains one of the major aspirations for young and older people. This ambition has become a genuine possibility for people in European countries due to the fact that they have a life expectancy among the highest in the world, and an increasing part of their longer lives is spent in good health. While we rejoice in living longer and in better health, and with more financial security, we also query how these aspirations can be sustained, through our own behavioural responses and through public policy and institutional reforms and innovations.
The challenge for researchers is therefore to identify strategies that are effective in promoting and sustaining activity, independence and health during older ages, with the help of public policies at the national and the local level, by initiatives from civil society organisations as well as by bottom-up behavioural behaviours. One of the policy strategies that has been advocated most strongly over the past two decades is referred to as “active ageing” (WHO 2002; Walker 2002, 2009; Walker and Maltby 2012; Zaidi et al. 2017).
The active ageing strategy is predicated on the insight that, in tackling issues associated with population ageing, successful measures are those which empower older people in increasing their participation in the labour market and in social and family engagement, and recognise that independent, self-reliant, secure and healthy living is an important prerequisite. The multifaceted design of the active ageing policy discourse allows the setting of policy goals to maintain well-being and social cohesion and improve financial sustainability of public welfare systems.
What has also become clear is the necessity for a high-quality and independent evidence base, to demonstrate how ageing experience at the individual level can be combined with higher levels of activity, both paid and unpaid; improved health status, both physical and mental; and a greater degree of autonomy and self-reliance, not just in old age but during earlier phases of life.
In 2012, the EU celebrated the European Year for Active Ageing and Solidarity between Generations (EY2012). The EY2012 renewed the focus on the potential of active ageing as a policy strategy (Council of the European Union 2012). To mark this occasion, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), the European Commission’s Directorate General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, and European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research, Vienna, jointly undertook a major research project to construct a composite measure of active ageing, called the Active Ageing Index (AAI), for 27 EU countries [for further details, see Zaidi et al. (2013) and Zaidi and Stanton (2015)].
The AAI is an analytical tool for policymakers to enable them to devise evidence-informed strategies in promoting active and healthy ageing among older people. The AAI toolkit consists of the overall index, as well as gender and domain-specific indices and their constituting individual indicators. In its design, the AAI draws on the definition offered by the World Health Organisation during the second World Assembly on Ageing (WHO 2002).
The AAI aims to monitor (and compare) active ageing outcomes at different levels: international, national and subnational. It indicates the untapped potential of older people for more active participation in economic and social life and for independent living. It promotes a more active role and greater autonomy of older people in ageing societies. The AAI evidence is used for mutual learning and advocacy of most appropriate policy measures.
The AAI uses a methodology similar to the Human Development Index (HDI) of the UNDP. One of the major benefits is that the AAI enables credible comparisons between EU countries by quantifying the differential extent to which older people have realised and can further realise their potential in distinct domains that determine their active ageing experiences. The AAI also offers a breakdown by gender, thereby highlighting the specific public policy goals of reducing gender disparity in the positive experiences of ageing.
In April 2015, within the programme of the second phase of the AAI project, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the European Commission’s Directorate General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion (DG EMPL) organised an International Seminar “Building an evidence base for active ageing policies: Active Ageing Index and its potential” (hereafter referred to as the AAI International Seminar) in Brussels, Belgium. The seminar included papers focusing on how to achieve better active ageing outcomes—measured, for instance, by AAI—through appropriate policies including those that address life course determinants of active and healthy ageing. The seminar brought together close to 150 researchers, civil society representatives, policymakers and other stakeholders. It provided a multidisciplinary forum for those interested in the use of the AAI and other similar research to enhance the knowledge about ageing and older people in Europe and countries across the world.
The AAI International Seminar was structured around five principal topics, which are the same as five parts of this book: (I) Use of Active Ageing Index for Policymaking, (II) Subnational Adaptations of the AAI, (III) Comparative Analysis of Active Ageing, (IV) Methodological Improvements in Measuring Active Ageing and (V) Use of Active Ageing Index in Non-EU Countries. On each topic a workshop was held, where the authors of papers, submitted under a call for papers launched in June 2014 and selected by an Evaluation Board consisting of the editors of this book, had an opportunity to present and discuss their findings. Fourteen posters were also presented during a poster session covering all of the five above-mentioned topics and beyond.
The Evaluation Board systematically reviewed the 34 papers submitted. In consultation with the UNECE and the DG EMPL, it made the decision that 19 papers suitable for publication would be included in this edited volume, and a selection of six papers more suited for a journal paper would be published in a special AAI volume of the Journal of Population Ageing.1 The papers for the book and for the Journal were selected on the basis of the following criteria: (A) intellectual basis of the paper, (B) logic of the analysis, (C) presentation of findings, (D) conclusions and policy implications and (E) whether further work recommended by the editors will improve the paper.
1.2 Use of AAI for Policymaking
The book starts with a set of papers which extend the AAI for the purpose of identifying policies to promote active ageing. The chapter by Dykstra and Fleischmann (Chap. 2) presented at the AAI International Seminar combined Round Four data from the European Social Survey with indicators of the Active Ageing Index and examine conditions favourable to age integration. It uses two specific measures of age integration: the prevalence of cross-age friendships and low levels of ageism. The analyses focus on both “young” (ages 18–30) and “old” (ages 70–90). Interestingly, high levels of independence, health and security in late life, and greater capacity to actively age rather than high levels of working, volunteering, caring and political engagement among the old create the greatest opportunities for age integration. They assert their findings that the phenomenon of active ageing in itself will not lead to greater age integration.
The chapter by Vidovićová (Chap. 3) compares the AAI results with the perceived roles and contributions of older people and older peoples’ own preferences and prevalent role sets. The AAI highlights productive roles such as workers and/or volunteers. However, the author argues that older people are socially recognised primarily for their contributions as grandparents and providers of support for families. This is true especially when older people’s own views are taken into account as they rate roles of a grandparent, partner, friend and parent of the highest value. They point to the findings that friend, parent, sibling and partner are the most prevalent roles. The discussion calls for strengthening the relative importance of the family roles in the measurement of the AAI.
Kafková starts in her chapter (Chap. 4) by asserting that the goal of active ageing policies is to improve older adults’ quality of life. It is therefore important to analyse the relationship between activity and the quality of life. This is achieved by testing the connection between the AAI and subjective well-being, both at a general level and at the level of individual EU countries. The results show a significant correlation but also they point to some problematic indicators. Employment has been identified as the exception among other dimensions having a significant position in the index, but the results cast doubts on its relationship with quality of life. Putting significance on employment leads to overestimation of the position of countries which, despite considerable employment rate, are behind other countries in non-employment indicators.
Wöhrmann, Deller and Pundt (Chap. 5) present the design of the Silver Work Index which complements the AAI centring on work close to the retirement age. It is intended to support evidence-informed strategies for dealing with the challenges of an ageing workforce. The Silver Work Index will allow for a comparison between organisations and promote good practices towards a more active role for older people. This chapter describes the steps of index development, thus laying the groundwork for a new, innovative, meso-level quantitative index that would capture age-friendly employment practices in eight dimensions of good organisational practices. The results contribute to an understanding of how to improve organisational practices involving older employees.
1.3 Subnational Adaptations of the AAI
This part contains papers highlighting challenges faced while constructing the AAI at the subnational level. They present the examples of a particular country (Spain, Italy) and how the AAI can inspire to design the age-friendly environment better. This part emphasises that European countries identify the importance of the subnational analysis of the AAI, not only through the papers presented in this book but also others, such as Breza and Perek-Białas (2014) for Poland and Bauknecht et al. (2016) in the case of Germany. This is despite the challenges in obtaining relevant data at the regional and local level.
Chapter 6 by Bacigalupe, González-Rábago, Martín, Murillo and Unceta presents for the first time main results of the AAI for one of the Southern European regions (Biscay) and how it could be potentially used for policymaking purpose. With an aim to apply the original methodology, apa...