An Analysis of Equity in Redistribution to the Retired and Children over Recent Decades in the OECD and UK

Abstract

Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractIn The Pinch, David Willetts (2010: xv) attracted attention by asking whether 'the boomers have been guilty of a monumental failure to protect the interest of future generations'. This was just the latest contribution to a long running concern of social policy analysts about horizontal equity and generational fairness. Using OECD data from 1980-2007, in the first part of this paper we show that there is no evidence that social expenditure has been shifting in favour of the retired at the expense of children, except perhaps recently in some Nordic countries. For the UK, we have created a time-series using the published articles since 1977 and the micro data sets since 1994/5 from the annual Office for National Statistics analyses of the Effect of Taxes and Benefits on Household Incomes and used it to analyse trends in the redistributive impact of cash benefits, direct and indirect taxes and services on the retired and households with children and across the income distribution. The analysis shows how the relative support for the retired versus children has changed over time, which elements have contributed to the changes and for which part of the income distribution. There has been a small shift in final income in favour of the retired but it was not the result of changes in taxes, benefits or services in kind but rather a change in the original income distribution in favour of the retired.

The Privatization and Marketization of Pensions in Europe: A Double Transformation Facing the Crisis

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Measuring the age distribution in Canadian social spending

“…Several researchers have produced international comparisons of OECD countries that include Canada in their analyses (for example, Bradshaw and Holmes ; Tepe and Vanhuysse ; Vanhuysse ). Generally, even the strongest comparative studies omit spending on medical care, tax expenditures, and sometimes even education.…”

Institutional Individualisation? The Family in European Social Security Institutions

“…Here, however, we aim to analyse the degree of individualisation of the social citizen in social security systems which is not restricted to care or financial obligations. In addition, most welfare-state analyses (Bradshaw and Holmes, 2013;Esping-Andersen, 1990;Saraceno and Keck, 2010) examine welfare regulations by means of outcome data. Here, in contrast, we deliver a purely institutional analysis.…”