Protecting the elderly and children in times of crisis : an analysis based on National Transfer Accounts

The welfare state has been shown to be a powerful, effective mechanism in the fight against poverty and social exclusion. Yet, it retains a surprising bias towards the elderly, as identified in more than one strand of the social sciences literature. We construct the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) for Spain before and after the Great Recession to determine how this bias might have shifted during the crisis. Our results confirm that children have borne the brunt of the economic decline. The rise in unemployment and the fall in wages inevitably led to the impoverishment of families, deprived of adequate social policies to act as a counterbalance. In contrast, the elderly were by far better protected, thanks to the well-established public pension and health care systems. The question arises as to why high-income societies appear to be so averse to old-age poverty while they seemingly accept child poverty almost without flinching.