As part of an IER research partnership, Dr Yuxin Li will visiting Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China for the next two weeks. She will be working on the “Ageing and Elderly Care” research network that has been set up. During her stay at Sun Yat-sen University, Yuxin will also visit two universities in Guangzhou – South China Normal University and Jinan University – with the aim of extending the network. Yuxin will also be attending the International conference on Social Policy and Governance Innovation to be held at South China University of Technology in Guangzhou.

Bernard Casey will be making a presentation at the forthcoming 2nd International Conference on Evidence-based Policy in Long-Term Care. The conference will be held at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), London, UK from 5th to 8th September 2012. Bernard's paper will be on "The development of employment and skills in the social care sector: a comparison of Germany and Japan". The paper draws from work Bernard did for Skills for Care and Development (SfC&D). The conference programme with an abstract of the paper can be downloaded from the conference website.

Bernard Casey made presentations at two recent events on issues relating to the employment of older people.

The first, entitled “The Employment of Older People in a Period of Stagnation and Deregulation” was prepared together with Atsuhiro Yamada from the Department of Economics at Keio University, and delivered at the latest ESRC Rethinking Retirement Seminar Series (University of Kent, 4 May). The presentation focused on older people’s employment in Japan over the past twenty years, looking at changing economic circumstances since the end of the bubble economy and the coming to retirement age of the post war baby-boomers. A copy of the presentation can be downloaded from here.

The second was a presentation on “Working Beyond Retirement: explaining a UK phenomenon” at the 7^th European Conference of the European Social Insurance Platform (Brussels, 23 May). Under the title "Active and Healthy Ageing and Solidarity between Generations - the role of social insurances", the event aimed to clarify the role of the social insurance in addressing the challenges and opportunities of societal ageing. Copies of the slides can be downloaded from here.

IER's Bernard Casey gave a presentation at the conference "The Cyprus Economy at a Time of European Uncertainty: Managing Reform and Sustainability", organised by the Hellenic Observatory of the London School of Economics and held at LSE on 10-2-12. His talk on "The Fiscal Implications of Demographic Change" gave an overview of the challenges of addressing pension and care provision for Cyprus's ageing population. Other presenters at the event included the Minister of Industry, Commerce and Tourism of the Republic of Cyprus, Prof. Chris Pissarides, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Economics, the head of sovereign debt rating for Europe, Middle East and Africa from Standard & Poor's, experts from the World Bank and the European Commission and academics from the University of Cyprus.

This week IER welcomes Professor Philip Taylor as a Visiting Fellow.

Professor Taylor is Director, Research and Graduate Studies at Monash University, Australia. During his visit he will give a seminar entitled Workability in Australia on Wednesday 16 November, which is to be held at 11:30 in B0.45 Social Science building.