Sustainable working-life for ageing populations in the Nordic-Baltic region

The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) open unique research possibilities, allowing for comparative research on the welfare systems, working life and culture across the Nordic-Baltic region.

Through collaboration on a regional scale with the research communities we will also get access to more data, like The Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health (SLOSH) in Sweden and Icelandic study on population ageing (HL20).

Thus, we have an opportunity to study a rapidly changing working life for people of age 50+ from a Nordic-Baltic perspective. 

The project consortium consists of three main partners - Uppsala University, which is also the leader partner (Sweden), University of Iceland (Iceland) and Vilnius University (Lithuania), as well as network partners from Riga Stradins University (Latvia) and Tallinn University (Estonia). The network will be even expanded towards other countries in the Nordic region.

The scientific work will explore:

  1. how our societies can adapt to rapid social, demographic, and technological changes,
  2. how to provide an inclusive, competent, and sustainable future labour force, work environments that ensure health and wellbeing and work-life balance in a time of hybrid working environments, flexible contracts/new employment forms and longer working life;
  3. how transformation of working life affects income trajectories for men and women.

International research collaboration will increase our understanding of how societal changes and new risk factors in working life affect different age groups as well as under-represented or marginalised groups and generate knowledge how the personal, socioeconomic and environmental factors influence healthy and sustainable working life in an active and healthy ageing discourse.

Initially a dozen of researchers from five countries in the will be engaged, but the aim is to widen the network in the Nordic-Baltic region and beyond it. The consortium plans for long-term collaboration on ageing, labour market attachment, social inclusion and wellbeing, etc. in a long-term perspective using quantitative research methods on longitudinal secondary data.