| |
Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
 | |
|
| The expenditure experience of older households | | Author(s) | Andrew Leicester, Cormac O'Dea, Zoë Oldfield |
| Corporate Author | Institute for Fiscal Studies - IFS |
| Publisher | Institute for Fiscal Studies - IFS, London, 2009 |
| Pages | 115 pp (IFS Commentary C111) |
| Source | Download from website: http://www.ifs.org.uk/comms/comm111.pdf |
| Keywords | Expenditure [elderly] ; Income [older people] ; Longitudinal surveys. |
| Annotation | This Commentary examines detailed trends in expenditure patterns between 1995 and 2007, with a particular focus on the pensioner population. Pensioners are not a homogeneous group, but differ widely in both their levels and patterns of spending - by age, income and household composition, for example. Spending may tell us something about household welfare that other, often-used measures like incomes do not. In particular, it may be that spending is informative about long-term well-being, whereas income is more about current, short-run living standards. The authors use the Family Expenditure Survey (FES) (now the Expenditure and Food Survey, EFS), an annual, cross-sectional study of the spending patterns of 6,000-7,000 households. They look in depth at changes in the level of real expenditures and how spending patterns have changed over time on housing and non-housing expenditures. They use data from two waves of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) to examine household fuel expenditures in detail. Fuel is clearly of great current policy concern, given recent large increases in the price of domestic fuel that may impact particularly severely on poorer and older households. Differences between spending patterns of pensioners in the richest fifth compared to pensioners in the poorest fifth and to non-pensioners in the richest fifth are highlighted. There is some evidence that between 2001 and 2007 pensioners began to catch up somewhat to non-pensioners in terms of their spending. However, since then, dramatic changes in food and domestic fuel prices may have substantially affected expenditure. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-090902202 E |
| Classmark | J3: JF: 3J |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
|
| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
| |
|