Prevalence of activities in later life across European regions

Abstract

The active ageing policy supports several types of activities, including labour force participation, caregiving, social participation, and physical activity. The paper illustrates the prevalence of supported activities across individual characteristics and four supra-national European regions to assess how these activities are available for specific groups of older people. The analysis draws on wave 6 from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe held in 2015. A set of figures describes the availability of activities sorted by gender, age, health status, and the level of education in 17 European countries divided into four regions, and thus, presents the unavailable descriptive data important for researchers and policymakers. The results most of all show that the majority of the 50+ population engages in vigorous physical activity, whilst labour force participation and caregiving concern about one-third of it, and other activities much less. The findings show the inadequacy of the active ageing as a uniform context-insensitive EU policy and detect its potential for raising inequalities in later life, whilst the theoretical implications are discussed.