No abstract

Today's discussion about the growing 'burden of ageing' must not neglect the substantial productive potential of the elderly population. Using micro-data from the new 'Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe' (SHARE), we explore crossnational patterns of volunteering and the relationship between selected sociodemographic characteristics and participation in voluntary work among the population aged 50 and older in 10 countries. Our analysis reveals a clear spatial pattern of volunteering (with higher participation rates in Northern Europe and lower ones in the Mediterranean countries) and shows that particularly age, education, health, and involvement in other social activities matter greatly for the individual's propensity to engage in volunteer work. Our conclusions stress the need to maintain a contextual perspective in future research on volunteering, accounting for the role of institutions and culture, and support policies and programs designed to encourage elder citizens to make use of their productive potential -for the benefit of themselves and society.

Our study supports the notion of volunteering as an important productive aging activity and underlines the importance of both life-course and social context factors as determinants of volunteer dynamics at older ages.

Self-perceived job insecurity is characterised by a considerable variation across European countries; this is mostly attributed to different labour market conditions and welfare-state institutions. In addition to the previous, often static examination of these determinants, this study asks how labour market dynamics and changes in welfare-state interventions are linked to individuals’ perceptions of job insecurity. It is argued that the changing context represents a set of shared experiences that serves as a frame of reference for the perception of job insecurity. Hence, time series of context indicators provided by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and data from the European Social Survey are used to conduct multilevel analyses. The results reveal that job insecurity is dynamic, as it increases in countries facing an economic crisis, such as Greece, but decreases in countries with prosperous development like Poland. Furthermore, the results reveal that the past development of the labour market and changes in welfare-state interventions contribute to the explanation of individuals’ perceptions of job insecurity. The response to these changes differs, however, depending on the dimension of job insecurity and the socio-economic characteristics of the workers.

In view of the steady growth in life expectancy in recent decades the question is increasingly being raised whether and how older people should be encouraged to be more active, and particularly to engage in unpaid voluntary work. Taking adult life as a whole the conditions for such charitable involvement would appear to be especially favourable after retirement. However, these analyses, which are based on German longitudinal data, show that the effect of entering retirement is often exaggerated. Rather, the individual's previous volunteering experiences are of major importance in his decision to take up and continue voluntary work in later life. At the same time the analyses show how important the major resources of health and education are, particularly for participation in voluntary work during ageing.

The paper investigates in the question if and how the subjective well-being (SWB) of German emigrants, German non-migrants, and German remigrants differ. Based on regression analyses of data from the European Social Survey (ESS) the analyses focus on life satisfaction and happiness as main indicators of SWB. It turns out that German emigrants show increased SWB compared to German non-migrants or remigrants. However, these findings cannot be explained by differences in the socio-economic or socio-demographic group structure. In fact, the increased SWB of emigrants is much more an effect of psychosocial differences and differences in the individual evaluation of household income.

A comparison of unemployment rates in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, the UK and the United States suggests poor performance by the German labour market. The present study endeavours to show that a more sophisticated picture of unemployment can be drawn by taking into account additional forms of non-employment (such as incapacity, retirement or labour reserve). For this purpose, data from the 'European Social Survey' (ESS) and the survey 'Citizenship, Involvement and Democracy' collected in 2004 and 2005 have been analysed. While 'unemployment' plays a dominant role in Germany, people with comparable demographic characteristics and similar health status are more likely to identify themselves as 'permanently sick or disabled' and hence are classified thus in other countries. The results of this study underline that an international comparison of labour market performance, particularly a comparison of the effectiveness of labour market and social policy reforms, should not rely only on employment and unemployment rates. Taking alternate forms of non-employment into account can enhance one's knowledge and understanding of the functional differences between the labour markets in Europe and the United States.

2 AbstractIn the transition from an industrial society to a service society, particularly changes on the labour market are likely to occur. A number of authors assert that these changes will result in an increasing external-numerical flexibility, which is assumed to affect labour market processes in terms of a generally higher labour market mobility and a decreasing employment stability ('high-velocity-labourmarket').This paper examines the hypothesis of a growing importance of numeric-external flexibility, applying simple descriptive statistical methods to the event-history data of the IAB Employment Subsample for the West German labour market in the years 1976 to 1995. There is no evidence for an accelerating labour market dynamic, but rather for a stagnating or even slightly declining labour market mobility since the 1970s. Furthermore, the job stability does not decrease over time, as one might have expected, but increases.Although the general results show no increasing fluctuation and instability, it is conceivable that service-sector jobs have become more unstable but that this increased instability is cancelled out by a considerable stabilisation of employment relationships in manufacturing. However, in the end of the paper it turns out that there is no evidence for such contrasting developments in the 'old' and 'new' labour markets.