ABSTRACT

The 'APPLE' project was founded and funded in the belief that it was capable of generating useful ideas and information, on the key subject of population ageing, for policy-makers in Europe. A lesson is a programme designed to deal with a problem in one country by drawing on the experience of other countries facing the same problem. There are degrees of lesson-drawing, or policy transfer, to be considered: from attempts at exact copying, at the one extreme, through attempts at emulation, attempts at 'cherry-picking' hybridization, right down to the mere garnering of inspiration from others' example. All of this constitutes good news for the chances of practical outcomes from the present East-West collaborative project. Policy transfer is the blanket, all-inclusive category, embracing everything from spontaneous policy diffusion, through forms of policy imposition to forms of voluntary, conscious, selective lesson-taking from abroad.