ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a simple framework to compute an indicator to be used in the ageing sustainability debate. This ageing burden indicator will summarize countries situations in face of the ageing process. Ageing burden differences across countries are great, but clearly they do not correspond with differences observed at the level of the old-age dependency ratios. Italy is the extreme case in terms of the ageing burden indicator. The ageing burden indicators are also very close for the UK and Portugal, 16.9% and 16.2% respectively. The UK's employment rate is higher than for Portugal and the generosity is also higher. This shows that countries with pretty different situations can in fact experience rather similar ageing burdens. The chapter proposes an alternative way to perform projections that implies sharing the burden between generations. It presents an illustration based on projections for some European Union countries.
