Age-Specific Wellbeing- and Transfer Accounts: Evaluating Intergenerational Support
Summary and overall aim
The AgeWellAccounts project analysed wellbeing from a life course perspective. Three teams from Austria, Italy and France worked on work packages related to the evaluation of intergenerational support in various European countries: The first work package focused on the age dimension of economic wellbeing. An important part of this work package was the measurement of private and public transfers between generations and genders as well as their interdependencies with economic wellbeing. Accounting for private transfers is essential for the analysis of economic wellbeing, especially due to their strong age and gender patterns. For example, low equalised income and a high risk of poverty among families and especially lone parents can be explained by private transfers to their children. Using various wellbeing indicators, we observed large differences in the development of economic wellbeing over time. In particular, young age-groups lost relative to the elderly population. The second work package complemented the first work package by focusing on the age and gender dimension of time use, specifically the work-life balance of families. The third work package was concerned with health, subjective wellbeing and their changing perception over the lifecycle. This work package had a strong focus on happiness and life satisfaction, as well as on the interrelationship between subjective and objective health over the life course. Overall, our research identified life stage and circumstances in which individuals are most vulnerable economically, health wise and regarding their subjective wellbeing. These findings are of great importance when considering necessary changes in the intergenerational transfer system.
Project details
AgeWellAccounts participated in the second joint call on ‘Welfare, wellbeing and demographic change: Understanding welfare models’.
Project duration
1 March 2017 – 31 December 2020.
Consortium
- Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria.
Alexia Fürnkranz-Prskawetz - Paris School of Economics, France.
Angela Greulich - Sapienza University of Rome, Italy.
Alessandra De Rose