European National (Time) Transfer Accounts

Abstract

The goal of the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) project is to improve our understanding of the economic consequences of demographic changes by introducing demographic information into the System of National Accounts (SNA). As part of the AGENTA research project (http://www.agenta-project.eu/), NTA datasets were compiled for 25 European countries and the base year 2010. The aim of this paper is to introduce the general concept of NTA, and to provide an overview of the European NTA data and the data explorer at www.wittgensteincentre.org/ntadata. Age is one of the main determinants of individuals’ economic behaviour. In general, people experience three different economic phases in their life course. Working-age individuals are typically able to finance their own consumption by producing more than they consume. In contrast, at the youngest and oldest ages, people’s consumption usually exceeds their labour income (Lee and Mason 2011b). The gap between consumption and labour income can be financed by age reallocations in the form of private transfers (e.g., transfers from parents to children), public transfers (e.g., publicly financed pensions and education), or assetbased reallocations resulting from participation in capital and financial markets (Mason et al. 2006). In contemporary societies, periods of economic dependency are gradually being extended as the young are spending more time in education and the elderly are living longer. Measuring age reallocations is useful for understanding the intergenerational economy and the organisation of intergenerational support; i.e., how the gap between consumption and labour income is financed in childhood and in old