Tribune. If the pension reform could not be completed, stopped by an unprecedented epidemic and economic shock, it highlights the necessary question of the sharing of efforts in the financing of social protection systems and more generally that of solidarity between generations.
We often hear that seniors are the main beneficiaries of past reforms, the working people having been penalized. But the reality of the figures leads to a more nuanced view. This is the point ofa study by France Stratégie that we have just published with Pierre-Yves Cusset. Four major lessons can be drawn from the evolution of these systems over the past forty years.
The first lesson concerns the total amount of expenditure: the aging of the population has fueled the increase in social protection expenditure – today over 30% of GDP – this growth being concentrated on the risks of old age, survival and disease. Seniors between 60 and 79 years old are by far the first recipients of social protection, while their numbers are growing sharply.
Seniors, provisional winners
Spending on them increased by three points of gross domestic product (GDP), as did spending on those over 80, which represents a total of six points of GDP for those over 60. Conversely, the spending enjoyed by those under 20 grew less quickly than GDP, their weight falling from 4 to 3 percentage points of GDP over the period. This would tend to accredit the discourse of an opposition between the generations of which the seniors would be the provisional winners.
However, in these expenditure trajectories, it is necessary to distinguish between two factors: on the one hand, demographic changes, ie the change in the weight of different age groups in the population; on the other hand, the evolution of social protection expenditure from which each individual benefits on average within the different age groups.
The methodology of national transfer accounts (or national transfer accounts) initiated at the University of Berkeley allows this finesse of analysis. Consumption, income or public and private transfers are broken down according to age, thus providing a coherent view of financial flows between ages over a long period.
A reduction in contributions weighing on work
At an individual level, the lessons are then much more nuanced. Per capita social protection expenditure for people over 60 has evolved less quickly than per capita wealth. This is mainly due to the successive reforms of the pension system.
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