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Purpose: Population ageing will bring economic challenges in the future. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether increased educational level could mitigate the consequences of population ageing on economic sustainability, measured as the gap between labour income and consumption. Design/methodology/approach: Using the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) methodology, the authors decompose labour income and consumption by age and educational level (low, medium and high) and compare obtained age profiles with those calculated conventionally. In addition, using the population projections by age and educational level, the authors project both profiles to 2060 for selected EU countries and assess future economic sustainability. Findings: The results show that the highly educated have a significantly higher surplus for a longer period then those with lower and medium education. Therefore, the improved educational level of individuals will have a substantially positive impact on labour income in the future - on average by about 32% by 2060 for all EU countries included. However, as the better educated also consume more, higher production does not fully translate into improved economic sustainability, but the resulting net effect is still positive at about 19%. Originality/value: The authors present for the first time an NTA by education for 15 EU countries and show the importance of including education in the analysis of the economic life cycle. The authors also show that increased educational level will mitigate the consequences of population ageing on economic sustainability in the future.

Population ageing exerts considerable pressure on the funding of public transfers. It is of utmost importance to understand how the transfer system can adapt to population ageing. Using National Transfer Accounts, we illustrate the different organisation of transfer systems across Europe. Countries like Greece and Romania, where labour income already falls short of consumption at age 54, would greatly improve their public system sustainability by following the Swedish example where this happens ten years later. High consumption at older ages is less problematic when financed substantially through savings (the UK) rather than almost exclusively through transfers (Austria).

Based on European National Transfer Accounts data from 2010, this paper quantifies and evaluates the balance of intergenerational transfer flows in 16 EU countries, including transfers in the form of unpaid household work. On average, the value of net transfers received by a child amounts to sixteen times the labour income of a full-time worker, and the net transfers received by an elderly person to six times the labour income of a full-time worker. Intergenerational transfers can be regarded as the reciprocal exchange between two generations: the size of the transfers to the child generation determines their potential to generate income and finance public transfers to the elderly population once they enter employment. We develop and calculate an indicator to analyse if there is a balance between transfers to children and transfers expected by the elderly population. The results indicate that in most of the analysed countries the human capital investments in children are far too low to finance the generous transfers to the elderly population in the future.

Recently, immigration and its socio-economic aspects have been in the centre of the European Union leaders' agenda. In this paper, we apply the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) methodology to calculate the complete set of NTA results for immigrants and natives in five EU countries. We find that due to the lower labour income, which cannot be offset by the lower consumption, immigrants experience a shorter independence period and a much lower aggregate life cycle surplus than natives. The identified cross country differences between immigrants and natives could be used as a proxy of the achieved level of integration of immigrants.

In this paper, we extend the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) methodology to obtain the age profiles simultaneously disaggregated by gender, education level and family structure. We present the results for four countries (Austria, Spain, Finland and the UK), analysing the roles of these three dimensions in the both inter and intragenerational distribution of resources. We find interesting differences across countries, some of them related to the degree and age direction of the familiarization of different welfare state regimes. Finland excels as the country with the highest level of public transfers, and in particular for the elderly and for parents of working ages. In Austria, public transfers are also generous for children and the elderly, and there are substantial family benefits. In the UK and Spain, public transfers are much lower and family-related allowances are almost insignificant. Consequently, in Spain, private transfers from parents to children are the highest, while in the UK asset reallocations play a significant role in financing elderly consumption. Overall, our analysis provides interesting insights on how gender, redistribution policies and family structure interact with the welfare organization.

This research investigates how the interplay between demographics, economics and welfare state transfers affects the impact of the ageing process on income redistribution, at both intra and intergenerational levels. We combine different EU comparable data sources with microsimulation techniques in order to measure how agents resort to the three available resource allocation devices over their lifecycle (asset market and public and private transfers), extending the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) methodology at the micro level. Agents are heterogeneous in age, gender, education level and family type. Simulating population dynamics at the micro level allows us to capture not only the ageing process but also the educational transition and the change in family structures occurring in parallel. The resulting projection model allows us to simulate the lifetime net transfers received by individuals from the government and the family, and to compute the adjustment needed to keep the sustainability of the welfare system. The analysis is applied to four European countries representing different welfare state regimes (Spain, Austria, Finland and the United Kingdom). We find differences in the role of private and public transfers in intra and intergenerational redistribution across countries, which can be linked to the various welfare state regimes. Apart from the expected differences observed by gender and by education level, there are significant differences in the interplay between private and public transfers related to parenthood. While parents privately transfer substantially more than childless people in all studied countries, the Austrian welfare state is the only one that compensates high and medium education groups for these differences through higher public transfers to parents. Such compensation is much weaker and more targeted towards the lower educated in the other countries.