During the last four decades, trends in life expectancy differed between East and West of Europe considerably. The present project aims to provide new data on cause-of-death trends to be used in comparative studies and to serve as cornerstone in further explorations of relations between mortality trends and health policies. Within the next three years, the collaboration between INED and MPIDR on this topic will allow to get started new projects devoted to specific countries like Belarus, Moldavia and Eastern Germany in the same time as already existing projects will be finalized. It will benefit from the involvement of young researchers who will take in charge the reconstruction of coherent series of deaths by cause in several Eastern and Central European countries. The project is made up of four main parts. 1. The analysis of the health crisis in the former USSR since the 1960s will be completed. The series will be updated for Ukraine and a book devoted to the Baltic countries will be published. Belarus and Moldavia will be added in order to complete the puzzle. An international database will provide with all the reconstructed series. 2. Germany offers a valuable illustration of East-West divergence or convergence before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. To compare the two parts of the country, data on causes of death need to be harmonized. The work already in progress for West Germany will be extended to East Germany and coherent series of deaths by cause will be reconstructed for the two countries since the 1960s. 3. Sub-national differences in mortality by cause will be considered more specifically: 40- year variations in geographical differences among 100 Russian oblasts and recent sociocultural inequalities in Lithuania. 4. Finally, the confrontation of all the reconstructed time-series (including Poland and the Czech Republic) with trends in socio-economic indicators and with implementation of health policies will be the basis for new highlights on health transition and a reappraisal of the reliability of the concept of divergence convergence process.

Over the past few decades, rural areas have experienced profound socio-demographic transformations, driven by their roles in ecological, digital, and bio-economic transitions. These transformations, further accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, have led to significant diversification, rendering rural regions complex and unequal—similar in many ways to major cities. Thus a key problem concerns our knowledge about- and perception of these places because the tools, concepts, and above all the public policies traditionally applied are no longer suited to address the increasing diversity of contemporary rural areas. Our consortium, RURALITIC, is academically armed and well-prepared and to tackle these challenges. The first step, involves rethinking ’the rural’ and examining the intricate relationship between social groups and geographical spaces. This conceptual requalification of what rural areas are, and can be, will enable the production of new scientific concepts and tools, including new data, surveys, indicators, knowledge and typologies, enabling a new and synthesized view of the current dynamics and processes of change and aid in foresight for public authorities. Secondly these new concepts and typologies will then be deployed to analyze the drivers of attractiveness, existing public policies, and innovative initiatives within rural areas. By implementing pilot projects and creating an initiative library, we’ll tailor recommendations to diverse social and rural contexts. Finally, RURALITIC aims to envision and produce various scenarios for Europe’s rural future. The main outcome will be a reorientation of public policies, from general policies to policies tailored to different rural areas, while maintaining the main orientations of European policies, focusing on sustainable prosperity, resilience, connectivity, and infrastructure.

The first generations of baby-boomers reached their sixties on the eve of the 21st century. The number of retirements increased over the last decade and will remain high until 2035, which means more retirees in the future. The current generations of retirees are quite different from previous generations. The couples are less often married. The increase in divorce rate and marital separations also means that retirees will be more likely to have experienced a marital separation, several marriages or partnerships and formed a stepfamily. Their professional experiences also differ, with the arrival of a generation of women who worked significantly more and partner who were more likely to spend more time unemployed. Although research on the impact of careers on various dimensions of old age is plentiful, the impact of the changes in marital behavior has been much less studied. Older couples have received some attention in sociology, in particular by Vincent Caradec (1994,1996), and in demography (Murphy et al. 2007, Tomassini et al 2004, Delbès Gaymu 2003, 2004). Yet, they have received relatively little attention in the economic literature despite these changes. Close to retirement age, the vast majority of people are in couples, comprising 75% of women and 85% of men among those aged 55 to 65 (Toulemon 2007). Inequalities among partners in terms of revenue or sharing household tasks, already present during the working life, can be accentuated or dampened at these ages. The risks of widowhood and dependence (Bonnet et. al. 2011) can become so strong that couples anticipate them by moving, adapting their homes or reducing their consumption. These elder couples thus make choices for which the determinants can be different that for younger couples. This project therefore proposes to study couples over 50, soon-to-be or already retired, along several dimensions. Retirement is a key moment in the life cycle and does not necessarily occur simultaneously for both spouses. A first theme describes the evolution in around retirement and at older ages: new types of unions, separations and family decomposition safer age 50. The description of the marital environment is essential for making demographic projections and for estimating the needs for dependence-related policies. Indeed, the presence of a spouse can delay the need for public assistance, as the spouse is often the primary caregiver. Retirement is also a time when traditional roles regarding the allocation of household tasks can be renegotiated, when one spouse retires before the other, or when one becomes dependent. A second theme deals with this time allocation decision for elderly couples. The end of the working life also brings financial consequences in terms of income and assets, which is the subject of a third theme. Finally, we investigate the economic consequences of marital dissolution in old age resulting from separation or the death of a spouse. The consequences of aging are numerous and cannot be adequately addressed by a single discipline or a single domain of expertise. If the approach adopted in this project is primarily economic, it also benefits from indispensable insights from sociology and demography. We have formed an interdisciplinary team of 14 researchers from six institutions: EHESS, the CES (University of Paris 1), CREST, CRESPPA, University of Cergy-Pontoise and INED. By bringing together a group of researchers around a common theme of older couples, this project proposes to develop specific competences on these theme to publish original research in international journals in demography, sociology and economics. It will also enlighten public debate concerning this population whose importance will only grow in the future. This could guide public policy in the fight against poverty among the elderly or access to information about the rights and consequences of different marital states.

The process of household decision-making encompasses a core question that lies at the heart of gender inequalities: the gender division of labour. The links between general household decision-making process, gender division of labour and gender inequalities are the focus of this research project which aims at bringing new theoretical as well as empirical insights on these issues. Now that time use surveys are made available in more and more countries, international comparisons seem to reveal a new model of labour division between men and women. The picture emerging is that besides a now massive female participation in the labour market in most developed countries, the household division of labour remains highly gender-specific. Research consistently has shown that women still do the largest share of unpaid labour within households. If an economist expects to explain this, at least partially, by the observed difference between men's and women's wages or educational attainments, these variables happen to have a small impact, if any, on the intra-household allocation of labour. Consequently, the gender division of labour, if not terra incognita, still remains a mystery for the economist. Beginning with the matching of partners, examining in depth empirically the key variables explaining the observed gender labour division within households and the role of childbirths and childcare in the differentiation of male and female trajectories, and finally further developing the modelling of the household decision-making process on the basis of the empirical observations now permitted by the availability and comparability of more and more time use surveys, as well as matched employers/employees datasets, this research has the ambition to participate, with the economist's tools, in finding out the roots of gender inequality.