Evaluating the impact of public policies in the medium and long term through the intergenerational budgeting

Key points

The EESC:

• promotes the introduction of an intergenerational budgeting approach that would foster better awareness of how resources are allocated by EU, national and local financial programming to the different generations, whilst fully respecting Member States’ competences and budgetary autonomy;

• calls on the Member States to systematically consider the intergenerational dimension in their budgets, for instance by applying the Youth Check to all relevant national budgetary items or through other methods, clearly identifying generational and potentially generational measures; this would help better align public spending with the principles of intergenerational fairness, while also promoting a generational exchange between young people and older people;

• encourages activating structured and meaningful youth participation as an integral part of budgetary planning and monitoring;

• believes that Member States’ budgets should ensure a fair equilibrium between family and child per capita expenditure and old age per capita spending, thereby promoting intergenerational equity;

• underlines the importance of ensuring the long-term sustainability of social protection systems by conducting quantitative assessments on intergenerational fairness;

• suggests introducing national and regional level intergenerational budgeting as part of the conditionality for the new 2028-2034 cohesion policy programming cycle and the implementation of the new ‘national and regional partnership plans’, to ensure long-term fiscal sustainability and strengthen the intergenerational equity of public spending.