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

There is a general perception that before the crisis there was a waste of money by the government and the families in Spain. It is important, then, to analyze if this misspending was made equally among age groups and to what extent it was due to the government or to families. This will have very different implications on the restructuration of the transfers system, which seems to be one of the main current concerns of governments. We propose here to analyze the evolution of lifecycle deficit and their related age reallocations profiles (transfers and asset-based) from 2000 to 2008 for Spain using National Transfers Accounts methodology. The aggregates show that the lifecycle deficit increased a 52%, meaning that consumption increased more rapidly than labor income. This implies that the necessity to finance consumption through age reallocations increased highly in few years. This tendency has been accompanied by an increase of the public share in the total consumption of the economy, growing from 25% in 2000 to 28% in 2008. This work aims to shed some light on how these changes have occurred by age, showing which age groups have benefit more or can be more affected by changes in the transfer system due to the crisis.

This paper examines the relationship between the cost of raising children up to self-supporting ages and the number of children parents have, by drawing upon computed results derived from NTA projects in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The paper is unique in that examines the role of the economic support ratio in this relationship.
Our results indicate that the two variables in question have a negative association in the three economies, with the calculated elasticity of −1.01 implying that a decrease in the total fertility rate (TFR) leads essentially to no change in the total cost of childrearing per adult. As regards the per capita child human-capital cost and the TFR, the calculated elasticity amounts to −1.64, suggesting that in these economies the health and education components of per capita child cost are more closely linked to fertility change than other components.
The paper also addresses the question of a trade-off between the relative costs of children and elderly persons from the standpoint of generational equity, as economists often hypothesize that population aging should lead to a decline in the welfare of children relative to the elderly. However, no “crowding out” effect between children and the elderly has been found in the three economies.

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).

Young dependent under 15 years have support of their LCD both from the public and private transfers but the magnitude of from private transfer is more than five times than that from public transfers. Public current transfer to young dependents is 10.4 times the transfers to old dependents. On the other hand old dependents in 60 plus do not get support from intra-household transfers though they have net gain from public transfers and inter-household transfers. It is noted that old dependents have to rely on asset-based reallocations to support LCD.
The totality of public current transfers (education, health and others), in kind transfers and social benefit transfers not in kind is Rs. 558953 crores and the corresponding share of these transfers are 18.8, 24.1 and 57.1 per cents respectively. The revenue of government from income, wealth and corporation taxes, indirect tax, other current transfers and public deficit transfers constitute 24.9, 49, 3.7 and 22.4 percents of the total collection of Rs. 558953 crores. In constant 2004 Indian Rupees (INR), the ratio of public transfer receipts to transfer payments shall decline from 1.07 in 2004 to 0.98 in 2051 and during this period ratio net gain of young and old dependents to the net gain of working age population from public transfers decreases from 1.56 to 0.84.

The United States is still in the midst of the worst economic climate since the Great Depression. Impacts have not been uniform across demographic groups, however, with important differences by age. While there is much research already about the age impacts of the Great Recession, it largely focuses on just one particular age group or just one aspect of economic life. To get a complete understanding of the generational nature of the Great Recession requires more comprehensive tools. The National Transfer Accounts (NTA) framework provides a more complete perspective, allowing us to examine the age dimension of production, consumption, transfers, and saving. In this paper, I will show age profiles of all of these economic activities for the full age range, from pre-recession years through 2011. The results indicate that all ages have been hurt by the recession, but to different degrees. The coping mechanisms employed to deal with these difficulties have also varied significantly by age and socioeconomic status.

Background: After German reunification mortality among older East Germans converged quickly to the West German level. Simultaneously, they witnessed an 10-fold rise in pension benefits.

Objective: By using this natural experiment, we seek to show, first, that increasing financial transfers from the elderly to their children led to increasing reverse transfers in form of care and, second, that this rise in hours spent for care led to a reduction in old age mortality.

Method: We use poisson regression to test whether rising pensions led to an increase of hours spend on care and if this increase led to a reduction in old age mortality. We use data from the German Pension Fund and data on time use from the NTA project.

Preliminary Results: Our first results reveal that since German reunification intergenerational downward transfers more than doubled. This is caused by the immense increase in pension benefits since the Fall of the Berlin Wall. At the same time, mortality for pensioners dropped markedly and converged to the West German level.