How is consumption of the young and the elderly financed? Evolution over the last 30 years

Carole Bonnet, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Ipkidi Badji, Université de Paris 10
D'albis Hippolyte, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Xavier Chojnicki, Université Lille 3
Najat El Mekkaoui, Université Paris-Dauphine
Angela Greulich, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Jérôme Hubert, Université Lille 1
Julien Navaux, Université Paris-Dauphine
Jacques Pelletan, Université de Paris 8

The intergenerational distributions of income and public resources are recurring issues in many countries public debates. A detailed picture of the various economic flows between ages over the life course seems then very useful to better ground this debate. The quantified analysis of the economic flows between generations needs to be used. The National Transfer Accounts (NTA) provide a complete analysis describing the resource allocation process at each age. Applying this methodology for France over the 1979-2011 period, we highlight the distorsion of the consumption pattern across ages. If the elderly per capita consumption was in 1979 a bit lower than those of the other age groups, it is higher in 2011. To understand these changes, we then investigate the evolution of the different age groups resources used to finance this consumption distinguishing resources from the public sector (public transfers), from the family (private transfers) and from the market ((dis)savings)