National transfer accounts and what they reveal about patterns of intergenerational transfers

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.

With the increase of life expectancy and healthier aging, multigenerational ties have become increasingly important in individuals’ lives in Western societies. In addition, increasing longevity suggest that most parents will become grandparents. The decrease in childbearing has resulted that grandparents tend to have fewer grandchildren competing for their attention and therefore can play a larger role in the life of each one of them. Grandparenthood has become an increasingly important social role for older individuals. During the last decades, retirement transition has increasingly become a life event that many individuals in Western societies are able to decide upon. However the decision is constrained by many individual and structural factors. This study focus is on grandchildren as an potential influential factor in grandparents’ retirement timing. The aim is to use Swedish register data to investigate whether the existence of young grandchildren has any impact on grandparents’ retirement timing. Part of the aim is also to investigate whether the geographical distance between grandparents and grandchildren can be significantly linked to retirement transitions. The study’s focus contributes to a deeper understanding of how retirement behaviors are linked to extended family relations in contemporary Sweden.

The objective of this paper is to understand intergenerational resource flows to inform policy design for the development of human capital in Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper provides empirical evidences on how changes in a population’s age structure—a product of changes in fertility and mortality—potentially affect the extent to which there is a surplus of production over consumption and hence a potential for understanding the structure of life cycle deficits across age groups and how these deficits can be financed in five selected African countries (Kenya, Nigeria, Mozambique, Senegal, and South Africa). The methodological framework of the National Transfer accounts (NTA) is utilized. Our preliminary findings from the countries indicate that public transfer to children is relatively impressive in Senegal and South Africa, and least in Nigeria; public transfer to the elderly tended to be rather flat in Nigeria and Senegal. In South Africa, however, public pension transfer to the elderly is relatively high. Public transfer outflows in form of taxes are much relatively higher in South Africa among the working age population and the elderly. Senegal’s performance in terms of transfer outflows, though lower than South Africa is much better than Nigeria.

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.

This paper investigates how Indonesian public transfers contributes to the well being of the elders and how the new social security system will be sustained in the future. It discusses to what extent existing government support reaches the elderly poor and meets their consumption needs. The results show that how the elderly finance their retirement differs by income level, that the elderly poor in both rural and urban areas rely heavily on public transfers, and that they use public cash transfers to support other household members as well as themselves. The analysis of Generational Accounting also shows that with the same scheme, in which public transfers only covers their 80% consumption, tax adjustment as much as 7% is needed in 2020 from the current level.
Alternate scheme that follow the commitment at Law on Social Security System considers higher coverage on health insurance, particularly for the poor families. If public transfers are higher to comply with the social security requirement, tax adjustment needed is about 13% in 2020 and increase to 16% and 19% in 2030 and 2040. General imbalance is increase to 26%. However, this adjustment does not consider other component of social security that considered as public transfers.

In Japan due to the rapid population aging and its large financial pressure on pay-as-you-go retirement systems, the economic impact of bequest wealth has been drawing a tremendous amount of attention. Despite that, there are neither official statistics on bequest for the whole population nor analyses of the historical evolution of bequest. Our study fills this gap by offering an estimate of bequest in Japan from 1850 to 2100, based on a computable general equilibrium model with realistic demography. Our model shows that the historical evolution of the bequest-to-output ratio follows the same U-shaped pattern described by Piketty(2011) for France. Moreover, we estimate that the annual flow of bequest represented between 4% and 6% of output in the year 2000 and it is expected to reach between 7% and 13% of the output by year 2100.

Reallocation of economic resources between generations has important consequences for economic growth and inequality. This study provides estimates of time transfers between generations and genders, and complements existing literature on monetary transfers. We use data from the Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS) to estimate age- and sex-specific profiles of time allocated to unpaid productive activities for a number of countries. The unpaid working time is then distributed, with a statistical model, to those age groups that benefit from it, in order to estimate age-specific consumption profiles of time. We observe large transfers of time from females to males, and from adults to children and the elderly. Life course trajectories are qualitatively similar across countries, but with significant variations in levels. Differences in profiles by household structure allow us to evaluate the the extent of incentives and disincentives for particular fertility choices in different social and institutional settings.

In developing countries where social security systems are not well established, the elderly have to find alternate ways in which to finance their retirement. Common retirement age in Indonesia is at 55 years old. Due to the absence of their formal support system, a lot of elderly work again, mostly in informal sectors. Familial transfers can also be an alternate ways to support their consumption. In addition to familial transfers, wealth and savings play an important role in supporting the elderly.
From the Indonesia National Transfers Account, it shows that assets play an important role in financing the elderly consumption, which covers almost 50 percent of their consumption. However, there is also a tendency that informal works support a lot of elderly during their post-retirement. Accumulated asset at the retirement age can be an important initial capital for the elderly to create an informal sector and keep working to continuously support their consumption.

I analyze in this article differences by age and time of the components of the life-cycle deficit; namely, labor income and consumption. I use the specific case of Mexico, where no panel data is available for longitudinal analysis, but repeated cross-sectional survey data is used to construct age profiles of these variables by age for a period from 1992 to 2010. The age profiles where constructed following the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) methodology. Given this information, I try to answer the following questions. How bigger are the differences in the age pattern of consumption and labor income over time? Which part of those differences can be explained by policy issues, quality of data, period, and cohort effects? I apply an age-period-cohort (APC) analysis, using a random effects hierarchical APC model specification to explore in more detail possible answers to these questions.