The sustainability of the welfare state is in doubt in many developed countries due to drastic population ageing. The extent of the problem and the margin for reforms depend - among other factors - on the size of the ageing process and the size of the public transfer system. The latter has a crucial impact on the extent to which the first demographic dividend previous to the ageing process turns into a second demographic dividend. The contribution of the different factors driving the demographic dividend is, ultimately, an empirical question. In this paper we contribute to the debate, exploding the cross-country comparison potentialities of the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) database. In particular, we introduce different configurations of the welfare state transfers – Sweden, United States and Spain - into a realistic demography Overlapping Generations, OLG, model and simulate its effects on the second demographic dividend.