The elderly bias of the Spanish welfare state: 1958-2012

The Spanish welfare state has been described as strongly biased towards sustaining the elderly’s welfare, rather than children’s. We study the evolution of that bias since 1958 through National Transfer Accounts (NTA). NTA disentangle how people produce, consume and save along their lifecycle, and how resources move among generations through different mechanisms (families, markets and governments). We extend the available NTA (2000-2012) to the past. For 1980-1990, we provide new estimates based on Household Budget Surveys (HBS). For earlier periods without HBS microdata, we use other sources and propose new estimation methods. We show that Spanish social policies were biased towards the elderly since their early stages. The consequences of that bias were initially mitigated by the small size of the welfare state and the elderly’s low demographic share. Higher social expenditure and the ageing of Spanish society have turned such bias into a serious challenge for the country’s economy.

学界普遍认为，西班牙福利国家体系呈现出显著向老年群体福利倾斜而非偏向儿童群体的特征。本研究借助国民转移账户（National Transfer Accounts，NTA），探析了1958年以来该倾斜倾向的演变历程。国民转移账户可厘清个体在生命周期内的生产、消费与储蓄行为，以及资源通过家庭、市场与政府等不同机制在代际间的流动路径。我们将现有2000-2012年的国民转移账户数据拓展至更早时期：针对1980-1990年时段，我们基于家庭预算调查（Household Budget Surveys，HBS）给出了全新的估算结果。对于缺乏家庭预算调查微观数据的更早时期，我们采用其他数据源并提出了全新的估算方法。研究结果表明，西班牙社会政策自早期阶段便已呈现出向老年群体倾斜的特征。该倾斜倾向最初因福利国家规模较小、老年群体人口占比偏低而得以缓解。但随着社会支出规模扩大以及西班牙社会老龄化程度加深，此类倾斜已演变为该国经济面临的严峻挑战。