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1. Introduction
For the first time in the history, the democracies of the Western World face the challenge of ageing populations. The working-age group has started to shrink quite recently; consequently, the potential effects of this demographic shift are still to a large extent uncertain. Nevertheless, it is clear that “the political balance between different age cohorts has shifted in favour of the elderly in most rich democracies” (Tepe and Vanhuysse, 2009, p. 2) and the redistribution towards them may grow further. Despite commonalities in the direction of socio-demographic change, policy responses differ significantly. An insight into the set of policies that constitute the welfare state regime (WSR) may provide some firm guidelines in this respect.
To date, the effects of WSRs have been analysed mainly across income or social groups. Nevertheless, due to the demographic shift, the redistribution between age cohorts has moved to the centre of the debate but important issues still remain unaddressed. In particular, Folbre and Wolf (2013) argue that research should focus on issues of the measurement of intergenerational transfers. The existing studies usually employ input (expenditures) or output (benefits and incomes) approaches. These methodologies have several shortcomings for the measurement of living standards, since various issues remain to a large extent uncovered, such as the accessibility and quality of public goods and services (O'Donnell et al., 2007), the implicit flow of services from housing assets (Onrubia et al., 2009) or intra-family cash and in-kind transfers (Banerjee, 2015; Folbre, 2006). We argue, these issues may be better captured by analysing the socio-economic effects (policy outcomes) of welfare distribution across generations. We use such an approach to investigate the nexus between welfare state regimes and welfare distribution between generations and ask two questions: (1) Do the existing welfare state typologies differ in terms of intergenerational welfare distribution? (2) Which countries perform intergenerational welfare redistribution in a similar fashion?
The paper contributes to the debate on the intergenerational conflict in terms of welfare distribution in the following way. It adds to the literature at the junction of intergenerational relations and welfare state regimes, complementing this vein of research by employing a novel measurement approach based on policy outcomes across generations under various welfare state regimes. Consequently, we study cross-sectional data...