Fanny Kluge, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock/Germany, one of Population Europe's Partners, has estimated how different the effects of an aging society will be on different European countries. One finding of her work is that the countries that have yet to recover from the Great Recession will face massive problems within a few decades.
Kluge and her co-author, the former MPIDR Director Joshua R. Goldstein, drew upon data from the so-called National Transfer Accounts to estimate the taxes people in a particular age class pay, and the public expenditures on this same group of people. Using this approach, the researchers were not only able to determine the number of workers relative to the number of children and pensioners, but also to weight the economic variables. They were thus able to calculate the “demographic deficit,” or the degree to which the budget volumes of the individual countries decrease depending on the changes in the age structure of the population. “We don’t offer prognoses of the budget situations in individual countries, but are simply measuring the relative strength of the effects of the demographic transition on individual countries,” Fanny Kluge emphasized.
The authors conclude that the national budgets of a range of European countries will be significantly affected by their demographic deficits.
Read MPIDR's full press release here.
Read the original research article, published in Population and Development Review, here.
[With material from the MPIDR.]