Marga Peeters
Email: huber@TinaMargaPeeters.eu
Marga Peeters is Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in Wassenaar. Her research interests are in public and international finances, monetary policy, labour markets and applied econometrics. She published recently on the demographic pressure in Egypt, the impact of food prices on government balances in developing economies, and the changing international trade patterns in oil-exporting countries. Her policy and research experiences are gained from the European Commission and the IMF, Central Banks (of Albania, the Netherlands and Spain) and universities (Warwick, Louvain- La-Neuve, Maastricht and Tilburg).
Papers Published in World Economics:
Demographic Change Across the Globe
This paper investigates the fiscal pressure, or the level of public expenditure on old and young economically inactive people, arising from demographic change in relation to the labour market space, or the proportion of the working age population not in full-time employment. The exercise is carried out for 50 countries that cover 75% of the world population. The pressure-to-space indicator ranks Poland, Turkey and Greece high, although, apart from Turkey and India, developing countries generally rank low due to low spending on the old (pensions, healthcare) and on the young (education, family costs). Peculiarly, economies with higher pressure have more space. The hypothesis that ageing economies have started using their labour market space in anticipation of higher demographic pressure is rejected. It is important to note that raising the retirement age in developed economies by five years alleviates fiscal pressure by almost 30% and creates 10% more labour market space.
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