Guadalupe Souto

Sustainability in natural resource management

Abstract Sustainability is the objective that many disciplines indicate as being essential to the resolution of environmental degradation, although there is no agreement about what this term exactly means. This study defines environmental problems as externalities, most of these occurring between different generations. We analyze the reasons why traditional solutions for externalities do not work in the intergenerational context. Our conclusions are, on the one hand, that traditional methods for evaluating the costs and benefits affecting different generations should be improved. Secondly, an intergenerational redistribution of natural resource property rights is essential to guarantee equality of opportunities for all generations, and therefore to ensure sustainability. Adequate redistribution of property rights will depend on the type of resource, as well as on other factors such as the rate of return on its exploitation and the current generations’ propensity to consume. In all cases, however, sustainability is sufficiently guaranteed by conceding property rights, as a whole, to the future.

A projection model of the contributory pension expenditure of the spanish social security system: 2004-2050*

The need for long-term fiscal projections is self evident. Of these projections, pension expenditure is one of the most important since firstly it represents a large share of total expenditure, and secondly because of the positive correlation between this variable and demographic ageing. In this paper, we develop a model to project contributory pension expenditures in the Spanish Social Security System disaggregating the results by pension category, social security regime and sex. The most salient of the results obtained is the expected steady growth of total expenditure in contributory pensions. This would lie around 15% of GDP around 2045 compared to its initial level of barely 8% even though the baseline scenario incorporates a substantial recovery of employment and female participation rates. By pension categories, retirement pensions are those that determine the tendency of total expenditure evolution. Interesting conclusions can also be extracted from the analysis by sex. For instance, even accounting for an increase in female retirement pensions due to their higher participation, the corresponding increase in widow male pensions implies a higher total increase of the total number of contributory pensions accruing to men.

How intergenerational transfers finance the lifecycle deficit in Spain

In this chapter we present the estimates of the national transfers occurring among age groups in Spain in year 2000 using the NTA methodology proposed by Mason, Lee and others (2006). The life cycle deficit is positive –a surplus– for ages 27 to 57, while the rest of individuals become dependent, being the age reallocations of both age groups quite different. On the one hand, during childhood and youth, individual consumption is mainly financed by private transfers (69%) while public transfers only amount to a 32% being mainly in-kind transfers, through education and health systems. On the other hand, older people finance their lifecycle deficit mainly through asset-based reallocations (66%), followed by public transfers (41%, composed both of substantial cash transfers –retirement and survivor pensions– and in-kind health benefits). Interestingly, we find that the elderly are net payers of private transfers, implying that they are transferring money or housing services to the young members of their family. This surprising result could be explained by the high proportion of co resident elderly. This together with the fact that all individuals aged more than 16 pay and receive private transfers at the same time indicates that private support and hence intergenerational sharing tends to be mutual in Spain, implying that Spain is half-way between the northern European countries and the Latin-American countries. (1) Departamento de Teoria Economica, Universidad de Barcelona and Instituto de Estudios Fiscales (Spain) (2) Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte (Brazil) (3) Center on Economics and Demography of Aging, University of California, Berkeley (USA) (4) Departamento de Economia Aplicada, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona (Spain) This work received institutional support from the Spanish Science and Technology System (project nos. BEC2003-1831 and ECO2008-04997/ECON) and from the Catalan Government Science network (Project nos. SGR-2005-177 and SGR2005 -460 as well as XREPPXarxa de referencia en Economia i Politica Publiques).