Do the Elderly Support Public Educational Expenditure? An Empirical Analysis Focusing on the Characteristics of Spending

This paper investigates the preferences of the elderly with respect to local public educational expenditures at the kindergarten, primary school, junior high school and high school stages in Japan focusing on the characteristics of expenditures. We applied dynamic estimation method to the data of educational expenditures after the latter half of the 1990s, during which period the aging factor would have been likely to have had a negative relationship with educational expenditure. According to the estimation results, the elderly population would not support an increase in current expenditures composed mainly of personnel expenses at every educational stage but would support capital expenditures of junior high and high schools, which consists of construction costs mostly.