The goal of the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) project is to improve our understanding of the economic consequences of demographic changes by introducing demographic information into the System of National Accounts (SNA). As part of the AGENTA research project (http://www.agenta-project.eu/), NTA datasets were compiled for 25 European countries and the base year 2010. The aim of this paper is to introduce the general concept of NTA, and to provide an overview of the European NTA data and the data explorer at www.wittgensteincentre.org/ntadata.Age is one of the main determinants of individuals' economic behaviour. In general, people experience three different economic phases in their life course. Working-age individuals are typically able to finance their own consumption by producing more than they consume. In contrast, at the youngest and oldest ages, people's consumption usually exceeds their labour income (Lee and Mason 2011b). The gap between consumption and labour income can be financed by age reallocations in the form of private transfers (e.g., transfers from parents to children), public transfers (e.g., publicly financed pensions and education), or assetbased reallocations resulting from participation in capital and financial markets (Mason et al. 2006). In contemporary societies, periods of economic dependency are gradually being extended as the young are spending more time in education and the elderly are living longer.Measuring age reallocations is useful for understanding the intergenerational economy and the organisation of intergenerational support; i.e., how the gap between consumption and labour income is financed in childhood and in old
Economic analysis usually defines the period of dependency with arbitrary age limits that are independent of country, year, gender and other factors. This paper uses the National Transfer Accounts methodology, which defines dependency by the life cycle periods in which individuals' consumption exceeds their labour income. The novelty of the paper is the decomposition of the results by gender, as well as the retrospective pre-and post-crisis analysis for the 2000-2012 period. Slovenia, an ageing European society with a small, open economy, is used as a showcase. The findings indicate that, in Slovenia in 2012, women were able to finance their consumption through their labour income for 29.0 years, compared to 35.9 years for men, with a significant decrease in the gender gap in economic dependency over time, from 7.9 years in 2000 to 6.9 in 2012. It would seem that the economic crisis interrupted the path to equal periods of economic dependency for both genders. However, overall, the gender gap tends to decrease, despite the economic crisis.
This is a PDF file of an article that has undergone enhancements after acceptance, such as the addition of a cover page and metadata, and formatting for readability, but it is not yet the definitive version of record. This version will undergo additional copyediting, typesetting and review before it is published in its final form, but we are providing this version to give early visibility of the article. Please note that, during the production process, errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.