Paying for Pensions and Other Public Expenditures: Overtaxing our Children?

Focusing on the example of the United Kingdom it is argued in this paper that al-though current public pension schemes may shift a \u85nancial burden to future generations, private and public transfers across generations o¤set this development. By extending the methodology of Generational Accountingto account not only for the burden, which cur-rent generations leave, but also the wealth, which is passed on to future generations we show that the \u85nancing of existing social security and pension arrangements seems to be less problematic than commonly assumed