The long-term evolution of intergenerational transfers in Spain (1958-2012)

Abstract

National Transfer Accounts (NTA) aim at disentangling how people produce, consume and save along the lifecycle, and how resources move among generations through the different resource allocation devices available (family, market and government). This paper extends the available Spanish NTA estimates (2000 -2012) to the past until 1958, to analyse changes in intergenerational transfers associated to long-term processes such as the demographic transition and the welfare state development. For 1980 and 1990, we provide new estimates based on the Spanish Household Budget Surveys (HBS) while, for previous periods in which HBS do not provide enough information, we resort to the available evidence on demography, national accounts and public finance. The long-term evolution of Spanish NTA shows the increasing weight of government transfers as a device to reallocate resources across generations and the growing importance of the elderly in the system of intergenerational transfers as a result of population ageing.