Population ageing and its social and economic challenges to growth and prosperity are among the most pressing challenges of the 21st century in Europe. In order to address this challenge with scientific support, the European Council and the Parliament demanded an infrastructure of micro data covering the EU that combines information on health with the economic and social living conditions of individuals as they age and as they are exposed to the societal changes precipitated by the population ageing process (European Commission 2000).
SHARE, the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, was created in response to these demands. SHARE has a great impact measured by the number of users, the number of scientific publications and its public policy support. The data has world-class value as proven by the many users also outside of the EU, especially in the US. The key value of SHARE lies in its strict cross-national comparability which permits unbiased cross-national comparisons of the economic, health and social living conditions of the European population aged 50 and over in all EU countries, Switzerland and Israel.
SHARE requires strong international coordination to ensure the cross-national harmonisation of questionnaire development and data collection and in order to avoid artefacts due to cross-national differences in survey methods. This SHARE-DEV3 project supported key international coordination tasks outside of Germany where SHARE is headquartered. Headquarter tasks were funded by the German government. Coordination tasks outside Germany include software maintenance and IT support, questionnaire development, database management and related common tasks.
Furthermore, the SHARE-DEV3 project supported the data collection in five crisis countries to fulfil the aim of European Coverage. On the one hand, these countries are particularly interesting research objects for economists and social scientists, e.g. Greece that suffers from the double burden of rapid population ageing and high debt. On the other hand, these countries were not willing (or able) to participate in SHARE. In addition to budget difficulties, some countries do not have a sufficient number of well-trained empirical economists and social scientists to incentivise national science ministries or research councils to finance SHARE. This lack of national interest is in contradiction to the interests of other Member States’ researchers and the Commission’s policy DGs in that country.
The aim of this project was thus to ensure that also these countries are covered by SHARE, and that their contribution to overall coordination is secured. The funding of this project in 2015 through 2019 has been concentrated to the instable portion of the SHARE operations, while all other core data collection and accompanying logistical coordination activities were financed by the members of the SHARE-ERIC according to Article 9 of its Statutes.
