Aging and inequality

Aging and inequality

This data summarizes the evolution of consumption and wealth inequality over the forthcoming decades of longevity. In a defined contribution system, with extending life span on retirement, pension benefits are bound to decline (at least, if the retirement age is not raised). These declining pension benefits will encourage agents to increase voluntary savings in other to smooth consumption over lifetime. This is likely to affect wealth and consumption inequality, despite unchanged institutional arrangement and stable productivity heterogeneity within cohorts. Our data shows the magnitude of these effects for the case of Poland, a country undergoing a transition from a defined benefit to a defined contribution, gradually extending life spans and TFP growth convergence towards Western Europe. 

Our data reports several measures for wealth and consumption inequality: the Gini coefficient, the Theil Index, ratios of 20th, 50th and 80th percentile. If you need alternative inequality measures, you can compute them from the raw distributions. If you have other questions, please, contact us. The files to be downloaded include data and documentation. The publication describing the macroeconomic OLG model providing the results of this simulation ​is available here