Box sets » June 2015
Our 2015 long-term fiscal projections suggested that, if left unaddressed, the public sector finances would have come under increasing pressure over the next 50 years due to rising age-related expenditure. This box compared our long-term age related spending projections with projections from the Ageing Working Group (2015) for the EU countries between 2020 and 2060.
In our 2015 Fiscal sustainability report, we assumed that GDP grows in line with its historical trend. This in effect implied 47 years of uninterrupted trend economic growth in our central projections. This box considered the alternative paths for debt as a share of GDP under an symmetric and asymmetric cycle, highlighting the sensitivity of the net debt projections to economic cycles.
Health spending rose faster than GDP in almost all European countries over the past decade. This box investigated most notable long-term drivers of real spending on health care: demographic effects, income effects and other cost pressures.