Resumen de Well-being of older persons in Central and Eastern European countries

Radoslaw Antczak, Asghar Zaidi

•  Central and Eastern Europe is a unique region in terms of its social, economic anddemographic trends, particularly because of legacy of the communist system andtransformation to a market system. The transition coincided with a rapiddemographic change in which younger generation was able to reorganise themselvesrelatively easily whereas older people found this change much more difficult. Thispaper builds a picture of well-being of older population in eight Eastern Europeancountries: Albania, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, Turkey andUkraine and compares it to eight other European Union (EU) member States of thesame region. We used the Global AgeWatch Index – an analytical framework ofZaidi (2013 ) offering comparative analysis of older people’s well-being across theworld. It is extended by gender-specific analysis for two domains: health status andcapability. The results show that the combined Index value of eight Eastern andSouth-Eastern non-EU countries is considerably below the average observed foreight EU member States, however, in some individual indicators, some of the non-EU states performed better than the EU countries. The evidence summarised can beused to assess the position of the region and points to areas where policy changes arenecessary.