Populations around the world are aging, and there are growing proportions of the elderly who consume but earn little, on average, with the difference made up by public and private transfers and by asset income. What will be the economic consequences? Standard national income accounts are not disaggregated by age and provide very limited information on private intergenerational transfers. National Transfer Accounts (NTA) uses new methods to construct age specific national accounts, including both public and private transfers, based on existing data sets, and is consistent with standard national accounts. The proposed grant will establish a network for the 37 country teams currently in the NTA project, funding the core activities of Pis and staff, training, and global meetings. Ten to twenty new countries will be brought into the network and trained, bringing the total number of countries to 50 to 60 and adding further contextual diversity and variation in policies, increasing the power of comparative analyses.
The Specific Aims are to: 1. Organize, train and assist a global NTA Network of country teams to estimate and analyze National Transfer Accounts based on existing data sources (secondary analyses), and increase contextual diversity and number of data points by recruiting teams from new countries. 2. Fundamentally enrich the scientific content of the accounts by estimating: longitudinal NTA, wealth accounts, accounts disaggregated by socioeconomic status, and gender/time use accounts. 3. Promote and facilitate research by the NTA Network using the data generated in Aims 1 and 2 to improve knowledge and understanding of patterns in aggregate intergenerational relations and the macroeconomic consequences of population aging. 4. Disseminate the data and findings of the NTA Network both within the NTA Network and to non-Network researchers and to policy makers. This is a Multi-PI application, with Drs. Lee and Mason as the PIs.

Public Health Relevance

The National Transfer Accounts project facilitates an understanding of the economic consequences of changing population age distributions by providing rich and highly comparable international data about age patterns of economic behavior and public programs. These data enable analyses about how public sector policy and private sector behaviors are associated, and how they ultimately determine financial sFiniiritvnijalitv of life, and investment in the next generations.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Aging (NIA)
Type
Resource-Related Research Projects (R24)
Project #
1R24AG045055-01
Application #
8551981
Study Section
National Institute on Aging Initial Review Group (NIA)
Program Officer
Haaga, John G
Project Start
2015-09-15
Project End
2018-05-31
Budget Start
2015-09-15
Budget End
2016-05-31
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
2015
Total Cost
$200,000
Indirect Cost
$51,791
Name
University of California Berkeley
Department
Miscellaneous
Type
Organized Research Units
DUNS #
124726725
City
Berkeley
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
94704
Lee, Ronald; Mason, Andrew (2017) Cost of Aging. Finance Dev 54:7-9
Lee, Ronald; Mason, Andrew (2016) [Macroeconomic consequences of population ageing]. Rev Econ Financ 122:83-101
Mason, Andrew; Lee, Ronald; Jiang, Jennifer Xue (2016) Demographic Dividends, Human Capital, and Saving. J Econ Ageing 7:106-122