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.