Fiscal Federalism and Demography

Helmut Seitz and Gerhard Kempkes

No 10/05, Dresden Discussion Paper Series in Economics from Technische Universität Dresden, Faculty of Business and Economics, Department of Economics

Abstract: The paper examines the effects of demographic change on federal, state and local governments in Germany with a focus on the expenditure side to answer the question, whether demographic change will induce vertical fiscal expenditure imbalances. We present estimates of the impact of demographic change on public spending based on a decomposition of expenditures into almost 30 categories (functions). Our results suggest that demographic change will indeed result in significant vertical expenditure imbalances between the federal and the subnational government sector as well as within the subnational government sector. In addition, the estimates show that the structure of expenditures by function has to be adjusted considerably in order to avoid deficits as demographically induced increases in expenditures in some important functions, such as pension payments, have to be counterbalanced by exploiting potential savings that arise from demographic change in other functions.

Keywords: fiscal federalism; demographic change; vertical fiscal expenditure imbalances (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H1 H7 J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/22727/1/DDPE200510.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:tuddps:1005

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Dresden Discussion Paper Series in Economics from Technische Universität Dresden, Faculty of Business and Economics, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().