Since 2010, every pension reform has revived the same debate: who pays, who benefits, at what age. A series of national transfer accounts covering France from 1979 to 2019, published by Hippolyte d’Albis, Julien Navaux and Jacques Pelletan, shows that this debate is looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Pensions are only one channel among others in the distribution of resources between generations. Wealth and savings constitute a second channel of intergenerational redistribution, largely absent from public discussion.
The essentials
- Public transfers (pensions, health, education) represent only part of the French intergenerational economy: savings, drawdown of savings and private transfers constitute other significant channels.
- After 2008, consumption by those 65 and older continued to increase in France, financed in part by drawing down savings and accumulated wealth, while young adults relied more heavily on public transfers (d’Albis, Navaux and Pelletan, SSRN 2026).
- Aging accelerates this dynamic: increased life expectancy prolongs the period of consumption without work and affects the structure of wealth transfers.
- Managing intergenerational equity without accounting for wealth transfers is like navigating without seeing a significant portion of resources exchanged between generations.
- The question for the coming decades: how to make wealth transfer visible in collective debate, without reducing the analysis to just another tax.
After 2008, two consumption trajectories diverged
The 2008 financial crisis struck French households unequally depending on age. Workers faced wage stagnation and rising unemployment. Retirees were largely protected by pension indexation. So far, nothing surprising.
The series by d’Albis and his coauthors documents what came next. Consumption by those 65 and older continued to increase after 2008, fueled by several channels beyond pensions alone. Seniors also drew on their wealth and ran down savings, which supported their standard of living independently of public transfers. After the crisis, unemployment benefits only partially compensated for the decline in labor income for households under 40 in several cases.
Several trajectories distinguished themselves after the crisis. For households under 40, the trajectory remained primarily determined by labor income, with unemployment benefits providing only slight compensation for losses. For seniors, it revolved around pensions and wealth. This divide appears in consumption profiles by age; a breakdown by financing channels would be necessary to identify the mechanisms.
National transfer accounts: what they measure
National transfer accounts, a methodology developed internationally since the 2000s and now consolidated in a European database, make it possible to trace the complete economic life cycle of a generation. Labor income, public transfers received and paid, consumption, savings, and savings drawdown: each flow is assigned to an age bracket.
The French series 1979-2019, constructed by d’Albis, Navaux and Pelletan, is the first to cover forty years of continuous data for France. It reveals three channels financing consumption at older ages: pensions and health reimbursements (public transfers), income from wealth (rents, dividends, interest), and savings drawdown (consumption of savings accumulated during working life).
Public debate focuses almost exclusively on the first channel. Pensions are visible, negotiated, voted on, which explains this attention. The other two channels weigh heavily nonetheless. In France, household wealth represents approximately seven years of disposable income, very unevenly distributed by age and concentrated at older ages. This concentration results from a lifetime of savings, inherited wealth received and real estate gains accumulated since the 1980s.
Diane Coyle, in her work on measuring economic progress, formulates a similar observation: our aggregate indicators render invisible the transformations that matter most for future generations. She applies this critique to national accounts which miss natural capital or digital assets. The same logic applies to intergenerational economics: a steering system based solely on pensions does not see half the picture.
Wealth redistributes between generations as much as pensions do
Saying that wealth redistributes between ages may seem trivial. But the scale of the phenomenon is less intuitive than it first appears.
When a senior runs down savings, sells real estate, or liquidates a stock portfolio to finance consumption or care, resources can be transferred to younger households through purchases, inheritance or gifts. Wealth transfer thus constitutes a channel of private intergenerational transfer, parallel to pensions and public education.
The difference from public transfers is crucial: public transfers are universal and subject to collective deliberation. Private wealth transfers are conditional on having assets. A senior without wealth runs down savings little and transmits little. A wealthy senior runs down savings at will and bequeaths to already-favored children. This intergenerational economy thus presents inequalities: between generations and within each generation.
The reading by Hippolyte d’Albis connects here to a point of tension documented by work such as that of Thomas Philippon on market concentration or Joseph Stiglitz on information inequality: when wealth markets, real estate foremost, amplify inequalities instead of correcting them, private transfers between generations reinforce initial advantages rather than smooth them over. The debate on pensions can reform the distribution of pensions at the margins; it does not touch this mechanism.
This reality appears from another angle. Aging in place remains a territorial privilege: the capacity to remain autonomous at the end of life depends as much on wealth as on social rights. The two questions are linked, and both remain treated separately.
Forty years of data sketch a long-term trend
The 1979-2019 series makes it possible to identify long-term trends that annual pension debates do not permit.
First fact: over the period studied, seniors’ consumption relied more and more on wealth, but public transfers increased during the crisis before losing relative weight during recovery. Second fact: accumulated real estate wealth, particularly by baby boom generations following price increases since the 1980s, contributes to financing seniors’ consumption, parallel to pensions.
These two trends are not contradictory. They overlap. France built a generous pension system AND an economy in which real estate wealth increased sharply over four decades. Property-owning seniors and the best-equipped households benefited more from both relatively high pensions and real estate appreciation. Today’s workers finance the pensions.
Access to homeownership varies significantly by generation and income level, but INSEE data from 1998-2021 do not show a general increased difficulty for young households, a phenomenon that declining births and housing tensions have made visible for several years.
This trend sketches a risk: inequality between generations widens outside pension reforms, on the terrain of wealth, without collective debate fully grasping it.
The effects of accelerated aging by 2050
France will have, according to projections from the National Institute for Demographic Studies, roughly one third of people aged 60 and over by 2050, compared to one quarter today. This single fact transforms the arithmetic of transfers between ages.
The longer seniors live, the longer the period in which they consume without working stretches. Pensions finance part of this consumption. But increased life expectancy also affects the other two channels: income from wealth is perceived over a longer period, and savings drawdown occurs later and over a longer duration. Wealth transfers shift toward older heirs, which reduces the leverage effect for truly young generations.
The precise question raised by this dynamic concerns the circulation of resources accumulated by a large, aging and long-lived generation to subsequent generations. This circulation will borrow a combination of pensions, health spending and dependency care funded collectively, and private wealth transfers, partly random and unequal.
Several trajectories are conceivable by 2030-2050, without any being preferable by construction. A first trajectory would be reformed status quo: repeated adjustments of retirement age and pension calculation, without touching the tax regime on wealth. Intergenerational equity would continue to depend largely on the lottery of inheritance. A second trajectory would integrate wealth transfers into collective deliberation: taxation of transfers, aid to mobilize real estate wealth to finance dependency care, development of reverse mortgages. A third, more ambitious trajectory would suppose broadening the steering indicators themselves, which the publication of series such as that by d’Albis, Navaux and Pelletan renders technically possible, so that governments see, in real time, the full range of flows between generations, public and private.
None of these scenarios implies a single answer. But the first signal to watch is precisely the spread of this type of accounting in official budget documents. As long as national transfer accounts remain absent from official budget documents, the vision of intergenerational flows remains fragmented.
Measurement as political prerequisite
There is strong logic in the fact that this subject is little debated: you cannot reform what you do not measure. National transfer account series have existed for about twenty years internationally, but their integration into public policy documents remains limited.
France now has a long and consistent series. That is a starting point. The High Commissioner for Planning and the Pension Advisory Council could use it to broaden their analytical framework beyond pension contribution and benefit balances alone. Other comparable institutions, the United Kingdom with its Office for Budget Responsibility, the Netherlands with the CPB, have begun to integrate broader generational perspectives into their fiscal analyses.
Diane Coyle’s logic on measuring progress applies here: publishing annually updated national transfer accounts would enable policymakers to see the evolution of intergenerational equity and the channels through which it transforms.
The return of cohabitation shows that French families are already responding to these tensions through private arrangements. Family solidarity amplifies initial inequalities depending on whether one is born into a family with or without wealth.
The real fork in the road for the coming years is institutional: either France continues to debate pensions while ignoring a significant portion of intergenerational flows, or it equips itself with measurement tools that would allow it to steer the whole. The series by d’Albis, Navaux and Pelletan shows that the data exist. It remains to decide to use them.
Sources
- Hippolyte d’Albis, Julien Navaux, Jacques Pelletan, National Transfer Accounts for France, 1979-2019, SSRN 2026: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7497079
- European National Transfer Accounts v2.0, Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/22550976
- Diane Coyle, The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters, Princeton University Press: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691253336/the-measure-of-progress
- National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), Projections of French population to 2050 (no link: institutional publication regularly updated)
- Pension Advisory Council (COR), Annual reports on the pension system (no link: available on the COR website)
