Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 2019, Vol. 17

This special issue of the Vienna Yearbook contains chapters derived from the EUfunded AGENTA project, which uses and extends the methods of the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) project to shed light on the ways in which the families and governments of Europe draw on the earnings of the working-age population to support both children and the elderly. Before turning to the fascinating studies included in this Yearbook, we will provide some context regarding support systems, global demographic change, NTA, and AGENTA.

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In this paper, we analyse the impact of population ageing on the sustainability and the intergenerational fairness of public fiscal policy in three selected European countries (Austria, France, and Spain). We use NTA and NTTA data, and introduce these data into a large-scale general equilibrium OLG model with realistic assumptions regarding demographic trends and changes in population structure. The results for sustainability show a sharp increase in the share of public expenditure to GDP for the main programmes of the welfare state. In the three countries analysed, public policies (e.g. education, health care, and pension benefits) redistribute income from younger individuals to older individuals. Our findings indicate that these policies redistribute more resources to older individuals in Spain and fewer resources to older individuals in Austria. We consider the effects of several reform scenarios, including simulations in which the statutory retirement age is raised and the tax base for financing health care expenditures are changed. We also describe the consequences of the population having a fixed level of educational attainment.

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This article analyses the development of inequalities between the generations in France using a composite indicator including income and life expectancy. Mortalityadjusted disposable income has greatly increased over the generations. However, a breakdown by sex shows that this increasing trend is attributable to rapid growth in women’s income, while men’s income has stagnated for all cohorts born since 1946.

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The article extends the discussion of the welfare state in the literature by presenting a quantitative assessment of the age distribution of public resources. It investigates the differences in the distribution of public transfers between age groups in different European welfare state regimes using the National Transfer Accounts approach. There are two groups of countries that stand out in terms of the age patterns of their public transfers: three Scandinavian countries and Luxembourg have relatively high transfer levels, particularly for the older age group; while some of the Central and Eastern European countries have relatively low transfer levels. In the other European countries, the age profiles of public transfers are close to the EU average. Total public expenditures and revenues in the two distinct groups are changing in response to population ageing: i.e. they are expanding in the Scandinavian countries, and they are contracting in the CEE countries. These developments may lead to the further divergence of these welfare regimes.

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Population ageing is making it increasingly diffcult for countries to sustain their current levels social welfare transfers from the economically active population to the dependent elderly. To meet this challenge, the Swedish government has implemented various reforms since the 1990s aimed at reducing incentives to take early retirement. However, a critical question has emerged in response to these reforms: namely, whether members of certain socially and demographically disadvantaged groups will, in practice, be able to work longer. This paper provides a detailed overview of retirement trends in Sweden, disaggregated by educational attainment, health status, and country of birth. Our results show that the growth pattern in the average effective retirement age since the mid-1990s was shared by individuals regardless of their educational level, health status, or country of birth. This shared growth pattern suggests that it is possible to extend the working lives of all groups of individuals, regardless of their socio-economic and demographic characteristics.

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This paper presents an analysis of the age patterns of production, consumption, and net transfers in the form of unpaid work by gender over time. Using the National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTA) methodology, we briefly analyse complete historical results for several European countries. Our main aim is to introduce historical NTTA results, which are freely available to the public for further usage on the AGENTA database. The results of our analysis show that the evolution of age patterns over time differed between men and women, and was highly affected by different demographic trends, as well as by the specific institutional background of each country. Our findings indicate that despite the differences in age patterns over time and across countries, two main characteristics of these patterns did not change: i.e. transfers of unpaid work flowed first from women to men, and second from the working-age population to children and – to a lesser extent – to the elderly.

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This article builds on time use micro-data for Italy to analyse the evolution of individuals’ time allocation during the 2002–2014 period, with a gender-specific focus. We are particularly interested in comparing changes that occurred between the years prior to and after the onset of the recent economic crisis.We use regression analysis to measure differences between years in the average use of time of men and women for personal care, education, paid work, unpaid work, and leisure over the considered period(s). In order to gain more insight into gender differences in time use behaviours, we further break down unpaid work and free time into detailed activities. We document a decrease of about two hours per week in female housework coupled with a similar increase in male unpaid work over the entire period. However, while signs of this gender convergence were already evident for women in the years before the recession, we do not find any significant change in male unpaid work between 2002 and 2008. It was only after the onset of the economic crisis, and the consequent losses in paid work hours, that men started spending more time on housework and family care.

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Recent work based on the American Time Use Survey (2011–2013) provided estimates matrices of “who provides care to whom” by age and sex within care activities in the U.S. In this paper, we build on that line of research by evaluating the strength of race, ethnicity, and national origin as proxy indicators of cultural propensities to engage in informal care. Our results point to several key differences and similarities between groups based on their characteristics. For example, we find that compared to other groups, native-born African American men exhibit the lowest child care participation and transfer rates, whereas foreign-born Hispanics of any race have significantly higher rates of daily participation in child care. Moreover, we find that the propensity to provide adult care is largely dependent on socio-economic characteristics and household structure. However, our models indicate that neither race/ethnicity nor nativity are strong predictors of the observed differences when household composition and socio-economic factors are taken into account. Thus, we believe that more complex cultural factors are at play. As an illustrative example of the consequences of demographic change, we introduce the care support ratio (CSR), which is a measure of macro-level dependency for non-market transfers. The application of the CSR indicates that future informal care time deficits may result from the growing care needs of the ageing population.

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