No. 638 - Ageing and the Expenditure of Italian Households

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by Vincenzo MarianiOctober 2021

This work proposes a reconstruction of Istat data on Italian household expenditure and income for the period 2005-17 and quantifies the mechanical effect of ageing on these variables.

During the period 2005-17, average household spending fell by almost 16 per cent in real terms. Ageing would have contributed mechanically to the decline by only 0.4 percentage points.

Since the mid-2000s, the propensity to spend among Italian families has grown progressively. According to the results of the analysis, the ageing of the population limited the increase in the propensity to spend by about one fifth between 2005 and 2017.

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