Ageing and the Welfare State: Securing Sustainability

Volker Meier and Martin Werding

No 2916, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Over the next four decades, increasing old-age dependency ratios exert an enormous upward pressure on welfare spending in most developed countries. As this is mainly due to existing unfunded public pension schemes, many countries have embarked on far-reaching reforms in this area, strengthening actuarial fairness, modifying indexation rules, adding elements of prefunding and, last but not least, attempting to extend the period of economic activity. Efforts to contain costs may also be relevant with regard to public expenditure on health and long-term care but, thus far, no country has started to really deal with these issues. Still, some countries have made substantial progress in securing the long-term sustainability of their welfare systems. What remains to be considered is re-constructing the system of intergenerational transactions as a potential way of removing disincentives to raise children and invest in their human capital in the long run.

Keywords: demographic ageing; welfare state; public expenditure; fiscal sustainability; policy reforms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H50 H68 J11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp2916.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Ageing and the welfare state: securing sustainability (2010)
Working Paper: Ageing and the welfare state: Securing sustainability (2010)
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:ces:ceswps:_2916

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().