Intergenerational transfers over time and space

One of the defining features of the South African socioeconomic milieu is the stark inequalities that exist across, for example, race, gender, and location. Paired with this, high unemployment means that poverty is rife. In addressing the challenges of poverty and inequality, South Africa’s post-apartheid governments have expanded the social welfare system, while prioritising expenditure on education, healthcare and housing. The effect has been a rapid increase in resource flows from government to households: growth in social spending in the first decade of democracy outstripped growth in general government expenditure and, by 2011, 30 percent of the country’s population was in receipt of a welfare grant.

Using the National Transfer Account (NTA) methodology pioneered by Lee and Mason, this paper investigates the impact that this policy change has had on intergenerational transfers between 1995 and 2005. Building on earlier work that has estimated South Africa’s first set of accounts (for 2005), the paper analyses the changes in private consumption and private transfers in response to this growth in public consumption and public transfers. With public transfers to both young and old increasing over time, the paper will investigate the changing patterns of net public (and private) transfers across age cohorts.

Recently the method called National Transfer Accounts (NTA) has been developed to measure economic flows across age groups. Age groups in which individuals produce more than they consume (prime age adults) are financing age groups whose consumption excesses their production (young and elderly). The NTA are synchronized with the System of National Accounts (SNA) and therefore they ignore production in form of unpaid work like cooking, cleaning, childcare etc. In this paper we add the unpaid work to the conventional NTA results. Based on time use data from 2000/2001 we discover that people in Slovenia spent on unpaid work 3 hours and 45 minutes per day, exceeding even the amount of time they spend on paid work (about 3 hours per day), which confirms the necessity of including unpaid work into the NTA analysis. There are large net transfers of unpaid work flowing from adults to the children, especially to the youngest ones (exceeding even the value of private transfers in form of clothing, housing, financing kindergartens etc.), and in smaller extent also to the elderly in the highest age groups.

This paper aims to complete the existing work on National Transfer Accounts (NTA) for Italy, estimating National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTA). According to Eurostat, among European countries, Italy has the second lower female employment rate. Although about half of the female population is not employed in the labor market, women have a very important role in non-market production. The exclusion of unpaid domestic work from national accounts leads to an underestimation of total production and of that provided by women, who invest more time in productive activities dedicated to household and family care. This is of particular interest for Italy, since we assume that the strong Mediterranean family model together with the absence of effective social protection policies, may result in high levels of non-monetary transfers between family members and, hence, of non-monetary production.
Our preliminary results highlight the existence of strong gender inequalities in household production. As we will develop our analysis, we expect to evaluate the extent of gender inequality both in market and non-market production. Then, we will focus on intergenerational private transfers trying to give an insight on family role in supporting deficit ages and transmitting well-being in the Italian institutional setting.

We investigate the reallocation of resources across age and gender in a comparative European setting. Our analysis is based on the NTA methodology, NTA-data, as well as on income data from the European Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) and data from the Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS). The aggregate NTA life cycle deficit is introduced as a concept of an economic dependency ratio that allows for flexible age limits and age specific levels of economic dependency. We move beyond the current NTA methodology and study gender differences in the generation of income and extend our analysis by unpaid household work. We combine paid work as well as unpaid household work into a measure for total production and consumption at each age and by gender. Our results clearly indicate that a reform of the welfare system needs to take into account not only public transfers but also private transfers, in particular those that relate to services produced within the household for own consumption.

This paper examines the life-cycle dynamics of real wages and labor supply in Sweden. The descriptive results lend support to the intertemporal substitution hypothesis (ISH), as the age patterns of both real wages and labor force participation (LFP) are hump-shaped. However, the age-wage profiles increasingly shift towards older ages over time, whereas the age-LFP profiles do not. This leads to an accentuated difference-in-differences of the two variables over the ages 45-64, and, in turn, casts doubt on the explanatory power of ISH for the senior labor supply at the extensive margin. My econometric investigation of old-age LFP further implies that, at least at the aggregate level, the backward-bending supply curve may better reflect the retirement transition rather than intra- and/or inter-temporal substitution. Based on the estimated age-specific elasticities, I found spectacular life-cycle variation in the responses of labor supply to wage change. This suggests that an array of life-cycle parameters (rather than a constant elasticity for all ages) is needed in calibrating the Overlapping Generation Model (OLG).