Who Will Support the Elderly in Taiwan, Revisited – An Application of the National Transfer Accounts Method
2017/10/17
研討會日期 : 2017-10-17
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor An-Chi Tung (董安琪)
主持人 : Professor Yu-Chin Hsu
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Professor Tung received her Ph.D. in Economics from University of California, Berkeley in 1988. She is currently an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica. Her research fields are Economic Growth and Development, Industrial Organization, International Economics.
演講摘要 : As reported in Lai and Tung (2015), ensuring the economic security of the elderly population has become a pressing policy issue, because of rapid population aging, economic stagnation and other large-scale socio-economic changes. It is found that public transfers and asset reallocation have replaced the importance of intra-familial transfers and own labor income regarding elderly economic support.
Although the above findings are reasonable, the data need updating and the estimation method needs modification. To begin with, past studies only covered up to year 2005, and yet accelerating population aging in the past decade has no doubt compressed further the ability of the “sandwich generation” to support the older generation, through both public or private channels in other countries (Parker and Patten, 2013). In Japan, young elders, instead of receiving resources from the working-age population, may have to transfer resources downwards (Ogawa et al., 2009).
Secondly, data inadequacy needs to be addressed. Although the Family Income and Expenditure Survey provides high-quality micro data, there is no social insurance data before the mid 1990s, and no retirement pension programs data until today. The net public transfers received by the elderly may then be seriously underestimated.
In this study, we apply the National Transfer Accounting method to Taiwan data, 1981 and 2015, and modify the standard estimation methods to solve the data inadequacy problem. The known result that public transfers gradually replaced intra-familial transfers is re-confirmed, but the finding about labor income and asset reallocation needs to be qualified, once we have improved the estimation on social insurance and related variables. Policy implications shall then be drawn.
