Social spending and demographics: The role of public policies in the intergenerational redistribution of income. Empirical evidence from Spain and Catalonia

Guillem López Casasnovas and Ana Mosterin

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: The demographic shift underway in Southern Europe requires a revision of some of the fundamental principles of the traditional welfare state. We analyze the evolution of several aspects of welfare and social expenditure over the last two decades. We find that in the context of the present demographic changes and real estate boom current social and pension policy leads to a new distribution of benefits and burdens which is highly intergenerationally unequal. We argue for a revised definition of public policy based on Musgrave's proposition as a possible rule for an intergenerationally fair distribution.

Keywords: Elderly; young; Musgrave; intergenerational equity; pensions; social expenditure; life cycle; income distribution; welfare state (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H53 H55 I32 I38 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/983.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Social spending and demographics: The role of public policies in the intergenerational redistribution of income. Empirical evidence from Spain and Catalonia (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upf:upfgen:983

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).