Looking at Intergenerational Relations in Longitudinal Panel Studies on Individuals and Households

In our advanced countries some (not so recent) trends now take, by their very strength, interferences and interactions, the shape of major challenges: the ageing of the population, - which after World War II took place in the context of a three decades long wave of economic growth and development of wealth and welfare -, is going on now in a very different context, marked overall by massive structural changes which affect both the economic and the social tissue. * A growing number of active people already leave the labor market at the age of 50. In most countries and in most cases these early exits are in fact exclusions, operated in connection with growing unemployment. In some countries it may be different, as it is in Luxembourg, where in a situation of very low unemployment and remarkably high income, early exits from work are mostly due to personal decisions. * But early exits from work (whether forced, as in an economy in trouble, or voluntary, as in an economy of plenty) and ageing of the population, in their combined effects, lead to a signi-ficant change in the proportion of active versus non-active people within the global population - a change coming close to a revolution and leading to an explosive growth of the cost of social protection. * Simultaneously significant changes take place within the population of the elderly, which is steadily growing in importance, socially, economically and politically. This highly diversified part of the population, at the same time ,: ??has significant and manifold resources, neither correctly perceived nor fully understood by society as a significant potential for its own future, ??raises serious problems, in as much as ageing may and does mean frailty, dependency, precariousness, exclusion, ??gains in autonomy and relevance in a way that will force the political actors to pay greater attention to older people, their potential, their values and needs, and to the place to which they are entitled within the larger society. These may be the reasons why we are gathering here...