AGENTA · Ageing Europe: An application of National Transfer Accounts (NTA) for explaining and projecting trends in public finances

The AGENTA project aims at explaining the past and forecasting the future of taxes and public transfers and services in the light of demographic change in the European Union. Conceptually AGENTA puts a special emphasis on- the links between the public and the non-public sector (particularly households) in providing resources in the dependent periods of the life cycle;- the links between the different components of the public budget (current investments in the health and other human capital of children shape the need for services and the size of the public budget in the future);- the definition of stages of the life cycle, such as childhood, active age and old age, in particular the age of becoming old, and how they interrelate to impact both economic activity during the life-cycle and the timing of, and circumstances surrounding, the retirement decision.In other words, we emphasize that trends in the public sector cannot be fully understood without taking non-public institutions into account and doing so over the life cycles of successive cohorts of the population. The guiding principle of the AGENTA project is to provide evidence based policy proposals to ensure long-term sustainability of public finances in Europe.The acronym of the project, AGENTA, has a double reference. We will use the new method of National Transfer Accounts (NTA, see www.ntaccounts.org) to analyse the increasing average AGE that constitutes the ageing of European societies. In addition, the output of the project will be strongly policy oriented, offering an AGENDA for preparing for long-life societies.