2025 (LIS)2ER-SHARE Luxembourg Workshop: “Pensions and Old-age Well-being: Policy Challenges in Ageing Societies”

Time: November 27-28, 2025
Venue: LISER Conference Room, 11 Porte des Sciences, L-4366 Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

Description

Ageing populations pose common challenges worldwide, as longer life expectancy, lower fertility, and changing labour force compositions are putting sustained pressure on social protection systems, including public pensions, health care, and social care. At the same time, tensions emerge between fiscal sustainability, intergenerational fairness, and the distributional consequences of policy reforms. In Luxembourg, as elsewhere, pension reform debates increasingly centre on how to balance these competing objectives while also maintaining social legitimacy and public trust.

On November 27-28, the LIS Cross-National Data Center and LISER co-hosted the 2025 (LIS)2ER–SHARE Luxembourg Joint Workshop on “Pensions and Old-age Well-being: Policy Challenges in Ageing Societies”. The two-day workshop, supported by the (LIS)2ER Initiative and the SHARE Country Team, brought together interdisciplinary researchers and policy experts to examine socio-economic issues and policy challenges faced by ageing societies in Europe. The workshop featured five thematic sessions with ten academic presentations, followed by a policy roundtable on pension reforms.

Over the two days, participants discussed a wide range of topics, including elderly care, health and well-being in old age, policies to tackle retirement wealth inequality, intergenerational consequences of old-age working, and the behavioural effects of retirement policies. The concluding roundtable, “Shaping the Future: The Acceptability of Pension Reforms” seven panelists from various institutions discussed uncertainties and complexities in making long-term fiscal projections and intergenerational justice in the context of demographic transition, polycrisis, and welfare state reforms. The speakers also emphasized the importance of fairness, communications and the processing of information in shaping the public acceptability of pension reforms.

Overall, the workshop showcased the importance of interdisciplinary collaborations and effective communications between policymakers, academics and the public to translate scientific evidence into policy actions. We thank all presenters, discussants, panelists and participants for their contributions and engagement to these rich discussions on one of the most pressing policy challenges of our time.

Programme

The full program is available here.

Available presentations

Please find below the list of available presentations of the workshop sessions:

Organizing Committee

More information on the previous workshops carried out through the (LIS)2ER initiative:

Learn more about the (LIS)2ER initiative from here.