Europe's welfare states rest on an implicit contract between generations. Low fertility, longer lives and the retirement of the baby-boom cohorts are putting that contract under strain – and so are climate change, technological disruption and the shifting economics of care. Who gives, who receives, and is it fair?
Two CIVICA member universities, SGH Warsaw School of Economics and Bocconi University, are contributing to a European research effort to address this question through FAIRGENs, a new Horizon Europe project exploring how intergenerational policies can remain fair and sustainable.
SGH Warsaw School of Economics leads FAIRGENs (Shaping Fair and Viable Intergenerational Policies for the Future), a three-year Horizon Europe project that started in September. Bocconi University leads the project's conceptual work on what intergenerational fairness means for sustainable policymaking, as well as the development of a new Intergenerational Justice Index.
Together with ten other partners from Austria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Liechtenstein, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden, the consortium brings three European research infrastructures into one framework for the first time: National Transfer Accounts, the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), and the Generations and Gender Programme. These will help researchers measure the flows of money, time and care between generations and project how fair Europe's policies may remain under different future scenarios.
FAIRGENs is as much about dialogue as about data. Citizens in Poland, Italy, Germany and Sweden will take part in focus groups, case studies and experiments to explore what they consider fair. An online platform, Agora, will bring citizens, researchers and policymakers into the same conversation. The results will feed into an EU Policy Action Plan on Intergenerational Fairness, developed with a Policy Advisory Board chaired by leading voices in demography and social policy.
CIVICA's presence in this debate does not end there. The European University Institute coordinates WELFAIR, a sister project funded under the same Horizon Europe call, which examines intergenerational fairness and the welfare state amid inequality and demographic and technological change. With SGH coordinating FAIRGENs, Bocconi shaping its concepts and EUI leading WELFAIR, CIVICA institutions will have a strong, shared voice as Europe debates how to keep its social contract fair for generations to come.
FAIRGENs is funded by the European Union under grant agreement No. 101289556.
For more information, visit the FAIRGENs project website, launching soon at: www.fairgens.eu or contact: Agnieszka Chłoń-Domińczak, SGH (achlon@sgh.waw.pl).