When faced with the necessity of reforming welfare states in ageing societies, politicians tend to demand more solidarity between generations because they assume that reforms require sacrifices from older people. Political economy models, however, do not investigate such a mechanism of...

Whereas the call for a political science based study of older people and ageing is not new (Cutler 1977; Heclo 1988), relatively little unified progress has been made so far. This chapter maps the field of generational politics and introduces our edited volume "Ageing Populations in Post-Industrial...

I present the Intergenerational Justice Index (IJI) - a simple four-dimensional indicator developed with the Bertelsmann Stiftung in order to compare intergenerational justice in practice across 29 OECD member states. The unit of analysis is countries, and the IJI is a macro-level snapshot...

Households and social policies both serve as vehicles of lifecycle financing through intergenerational transfers, with working-age people as net contributors and children and the elderly as beneficiaries. However, there is a marked socialization asymmetry. Working-age people pay taxes and social...

European societies transfer more per capita resources to children than to the elderly, once we go beyond mere public transfer data and also take into account intra-household private transfers by families. Mostly, these are resources parents spend on buying goods and services for their children,...

What are the net resource transfer burdens of working-age parents and non-parents in Europe? We estimate all cash, in-kind, and time transfers of the market economy and the household economy, through both public and familial channels, for fourteen European countries in the early 2000s. We...

The essay summarizes European findings from the Bertelsmann Stiftung report 'Intergenerational Justice in Aging Societies' (Vanhuysse, 2013). Sustainability is the moral starting point for developing this four-dimensional snapshot intergenerational justice index: ‘enough and as good’ ought...