Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/205503 
Year of Publication: 
2002
Series/Report no.: 
New Zealand Treasury Working Paper No. 02/28
Publisher: 
New Zealand Government, The Treasury, Wellington
Abstract: 
It is widely recognised that as the population ages there will be potentially significant implications for a wide range of economic variables, including in particular the fiscal costs of social expenditures. Long term fiscal planning requires estimates of the possible future path of public spending. This paper presents projections for 14 categories of social spending. These projections are based on detailed demographic estimates covering fertility, migration and mortality disaggregated by single year of age and gender. Distributional parameters are incorporated for all of the major variables, and are used to build up probabilistic projections for social expenditure as a share of GDP using simulation. Attention is focussed on health expenditures which are disaggregated into seven broad classes. In addition we explore the impacts of alternative hypothesis about future health costs. While it can be predicted with some confidence that overall social expenditures will rise, the results suggest that long term planning would be enriched by recognising the distributions about point estimates of projected social costs.
Subjects: 
Population
projections
stochastic simulation
social expenditure
fiscal costs
New Zealand
JEL: 
E61
H50
J11
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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