Demographic Change and Public Education Spending: A Conflict between Young and Old?

Education Economics, 2007, vol. 15, issue 3, pages 277-292

Abstract: Demographic change in industrial countries will influence educational spending in potentially two ways. On the one hand, the decline in the number of school-age children should alleviate the financial pressure. On the other hand, the theoretical/empirical literature has established that the concomitantly increasing proportion of elderly in the population can influence the propensity of politicians to spend on education. Using a panel of the Swiss Cantons for the period from 1990 to 2002, we find that the education system has exhibited little elasticity in adjusting to changes in the school-age population, and that the share of the elderly population has a significantly negative influence on the willingness to spend on public education.

Keywords: Public finance; education finance; demographics; panel estimates; Switzerland (search for similar items in EconPapers)
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article& ... 40C6AD35DC6213A474B5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Demographic Change and Public Education Spending: A Conflict between Young and Old? (2005)
Working Paper: Dempgraphic Change and Public Education Spending a Conflict between Young and Old? (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/subscription.html

Access Statistics for this article

Education Economics is edited by Steve Bradley

More articles in Education Economics from Taylor and Francis Journals
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().