The Generations and Gender Programme (GGP) provides high quality cross-national, longitudinal data for the study of population change. The data provided by the GGP have been used by more than 3,000 researchers worldwide and have led to over 500 peer-reviewed journal articles. The data have provided insights into some of the most pressing societal challenges such as care for older persons, female employment, inequality, social exclusion, social mobility and migration. The overall objective of GGP-EPI is to bring the GGP to the level of maturity required for inclusion as an active project on the 2020 ESFRI Roadmap and eventually for its full implementation as a distributed research infrastructure. Specifically, the project sets out to ‘Evaluate, Plan and Initiate’ the GGP’s transition to a distributed research infrastructure through a series of activities which will strengthen all aspects of the project from its fieldwork operations through to its long term financing and governance. This includes: (1) To evaluate the GGP’s governance and management structure and to identify the governance, financial, and legal model that will best serve the GGP and its various stakeholders; (2) To plan for the recent and foreseeable technological and data developments and identify the e-needs of the GGP; and (3) To initiate the centralization of the GGP’s operations throughout its data life cycle and especially in connection with new data collection. In doing so, the GGP will strengthen its position in the European Research Area, and will deliver innovative, cutting edge data on population change for researchers and policy makers.

SUSTAINWELL addresses the long-term socio-economic impact of population ageing on European society. SUSTAINWELL aims will be to identify: (i) opportunities arising from longer and healthy life expectancy and in general from the silver economy; (ii) resilient responses from individuals and households (in market and non-market outcomes) and from other actors in society facing the challenges posed by ageing; (iii) the impact of ageing on inequality (both within and between generations), knowing that social cohesion is crucial to face the ageing challenge; (iv) gender and lifecycle balanced policies helping the sandwich-generation to sustain baby-boomers entering retirement, without decreasing fertility nor investment in education. Particular attention will be devoted to the role of job design to foster intergenerational complementarities in the labour market. To better understand the benefits of living longer, SUSTAINWELL will take a holistic perspective by: a) investigating the behavioural reactions in key lifetime decisions along the lifecycle (education, skills, fertility, work effort, home production, savings and retirement) and the decision process itself leading to prosocial behaviour; and b) accounting for the three ways to provide welbeing along the lifecycle (market, family and welfare state). Both dimensions will be analyzed by extending the National Transfer Accounts method (using comparable EU datasets) to be incorporated as inputs in a dynamic microsimulation comparative model quantifying the future of ageing societies. SUSTAINWELL will take a new multidisciplinary approach in different basic (Neuroscience) and social sciences (Economics, Demographics, Sociology and Political Science). SUSTAINWELL’s results will be pursued in permanent contact with stakeholders, to deliver knowledge and evidence-based policy measures by applying a participatory design and co-creation activities.