Demographic Change and Public Education Spending a Conflict between Young and Old?

Ueli Grob and Stefan Wolter
Additional contact information
Ueli Grob: University of Bern

No 8, Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW)

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)
JEL-codes: H72 I22 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2006-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.business.uzh.ch/RePEc/iso/leadinghouse/0008_lhwpaper.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Demographic Change and Public Education Spending: A Conflict between Young and Old? (2005)
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:iso:educat:0008

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sara Brunner ().