15:30 - 17:45
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Fabio Franchino
Discussant/s:
Michael Becher
Meeting Room J

Fabio Franchino
International Oversight of Fiscal Discipline

Felix Hartmann
Compromise under Pressure: Bargaining over Public Spending

Matthew di Giuseppe, Kathleen Brown, Alessia Aspide, Xander Slaski
Greying Debt: Age and Preferences towards Public Debt

Md Mujahedul Islam
Public Spending, Clarity of Responsibility and Voter Choice
Greying Debt: Age and Preferences towards Public Debt
Matthew di Giuseppe, Kathleen Brown, Alessia Aspide, Xander Slaski
Leiden University

There is growing concern that aging populations, resulting from a combination of increasing life expectancy and declining fertility rates, will add further to already large public debt burdens in Europe. Yet, we know very little about how age and generational conflict influence citizen’s attitudes towards public debt consolidation. Will people’s opinions about the urgency of debt consolidation change as they grow older? Or will they show concern for future generations? Adopting a micro-level perspective, we hypothesise that when people grow older, they are less concerned about public debt accumulation because of their shorter time horizons. We test this argument with a multilevel model and 10-years of Eurobarometer responses (between 2010 to 2019) of 600,000 individuals which report preferences towards public debt consolidation. We find that age has a strong negative correlation with support for fiscal consolidation. This effect is robust to confounding by a variety of demographic, geographic, political and economic covariates. Our findings are highly relevant for public policy because we show that in addition to creating more demand for public spending, an ageing society poses an extra challenge to a country’s financial viability, since individuals’ support for fiscal adjustment declines as they age.