WELTRANSIM investigates the distributional effects of the welfare state regimes taking an integrated perspective both in:
WELTRANSIM aims to explain the distributional effects induced by the ageing process, looking at how welfare models contribute to mitigating such effects and securing wellbeing across the life cycle (from childhood to old age). WELTRANSIM is funded by the Joint Programming Initiative “More Years, Better Lives”. It is led by the University of Barcelona in collaboration with the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO), the Finnish Institute for Economic Research, and the Finnish Center for Pensions.
The project is structured in the following Working Packages (WP):
WP1 (led by WIFO) builds a micro simulation tool, microWELT, starting from EUROMOD and incorporating the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) logic to project the impact of population ageing on the intra and intergenerational income redistribution produced by the welfare state regimes. MicroWELT is a dynamic microsimulation open source platform (http://www.microwelt.eu/) based on EU comparable data sets, easily portable to other countries.
WP2 investigates the interactions between the ageing process and the evolution of total transfers to children and to the elderly in different countries together with the policy aspects of ageing, testing the “political power of the elderly” hypothesis (Michailidis et al., 2019a). Additionally, Michaildis et al., (2019b) uses NTA profiles to evaluate the political sustainability of the current system of intergenerational transfers. See papers and policy briefs.
WP3 explores the micro dimension of the NTA methodology, building disaggregated NTA by family type and educational level. These estimates are incorporated into the microWELT model permitting an evaluation of both intra an intergenerational income redistribution effect of the welfare state models. See Abio et al. (2020).
WP4: NTA and elderly wellbeing. Compares the role of money and time transfers to dependent age-groups (children and the elderly people), constructing indicators of time transfers for the elderly as a measure of a subjective dimension wellbeing.
As a result, microWELT, incorporates heterogeneous agents in terms of education and family status. It has been already applied to four countries representative of the main welfare regimes, namely Austria (Conservative), Finland (Nordic), UK (Liberal), and Spain (Mediterranean).
An extension of simulation model is being elaborated in the framework of the 2019 LLAV 00071 project financed by the Catalan Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR) and FEDER funds, in order to transfer the simulation tool to Spanish policy making institutions.