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The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is a multidisciplinary and cross-national database of micro data on health, socio-economic status as well as social and family networks of some 29,000 individuals aged 50 or over. Eleven countries have contributed data to the 2004 SHARE baseline study. They constitute a balanced representation of the various regions in Europe, ranging from Scandinavia (Denmark and Sweden) through Central Europe (Austria, France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands) to the Mediterranean (Spain, Italy and Greece). Further data have been collected in 2005-06 in Israel. Two 'new' EU member states - the Czech Republic and Poland - as well as Ireland have joined SHARE for its second wave in 2006.
SHARE ist co-ordinated centrally at the Mannheim Research Institute for the Economics of Aging by Prof. Axel Börsch-Supan, Ph.D. (Project co-ordinator) and PD Dr. Hendrik Jürges (Assistant co-ordinator). It is designed after the role models of the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), but has the advantage of encompassing cross-national variation in public policies, cultures and histories across a variety of European countries. The data is freely available to the entire research community.
SHARE currently builds up a biannual panel with funding from the European Commission, the US National Institute on Aging [1]and national sources.