This book has sought to elucidate how and why social policies in the rich democracies vary in the way that they treat older and younger members of society. Yet in the course of devising a strategy for measuring the age orientation of social policies, testing alternative theories, and elaborating mechanisms through the use of case studies, less attention has been paid to the question of why, after all, the “age” of welfare matters. This final chapter, then, explores the implications of the book's findings about the age orientation of welfare states for the well-being of different age groups and for scholarship about the welfare state.

Age Orientation, Poverty, and Inequality

How does the age orientation of welfare states contribute to the well-being of different groups in the population? We might think first of the welfare state's capacity to reduce the incidence of poverty among children, working-age adults, or the elderly. It seems reasonable to assume that, other things being equal, elderly-oriented welfare states would do a better job at reducing poverty among the elderly than among non-elderly adults and children. On the other hand, in relatively youth-oriented welfare states, which in fact merely spend roughly equally on the old and the young, the poverty reduction due to taxes and transfers should be more equal across age groups.

This proposition is in theory testable using cross-nationally comparable household-level data on income from the market and from social programs. Such data are available from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) project.