Title:	Economics and Ageing
Authors:	José Luis Iparraguirre
Keywords:	Economics
Issue Date:	2018
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	The US economist and Nobel Prize winner James Tobin once stated: ‘The most difficult issues of political economy are those where goals of efficiency, freedom of choice, and equality conflict’ (Tobin 1970, p. 263). Fiscal policy is one of these issues. It comprises public spending and taxation. In his classic textbook on public finances, Richard Musgrave identified three functions of fiscal policy: allocation, distribution, and stabilisation (Musgrave and Musgrave 1989). Through their spending and revenue, governments influence the state of an economy, its long-run evolution, and the distribution of resources. As we will see in this chapter, population and individual ageing are linked to these three functions, so much so that Lee et al. (2010, p. 80) stated: ‘The projection of population under girds most long term economic projections and certainly all fiscal ones’. For example, the evolution of population ageing is projected to be one of the main drivers of public spending via age-related items, such as health, and to put pressure on long-term fiscal stability and sustainability; in addition, given the age profiles of—especially—labour-related income, economists have studied the case for age-dependent (or age-conditioned) taxes for allocative and distributive reasons.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/55240
ISBN:	978-3-319-93357-3
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

Items in DSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.