Welfare states clearly work to transfer resources between age groups, not least through pay-as-you-go old-age pensions, which account for one-fifth to one-half of total social spending in most countries of the OECD. But the elderly in different countries benefit to varying extents not only from cross-national differences in the generosity of pension benefits, but also from differences in other policy areas, such as housing and health care. Similarly, working-age adults and children benefit from a variety of programs financed by the population at large, including education, publicly provided child care, and income supports.

The concept of intergenerational justice has prompted a robust theoretical literature, but little empirical investigation. In particular, we know very little about how social provisions for different age groups vary across welfare state types, across countries, or across time. Because so little is known about the age-distributive properties of social policies, it is dangerous to conclude that “the contemporary welfare state in capitalist democracies is largely a welfare state for the elderly” (Myles 1989). Nor can we be sure that, as some have argued, a single “selfish generation” that reached adulthood just after the Second World War has tailored welfare state spending for its own purposes (Thomson 1993). Without reliable measures of the age orientation of social policies across nations and over time, it is impossible to know to what extent contemporary welfare states are biased toward the elderly of particular generations, toward successive cohorts of the elderly, or even if they are uniformly biased toward the elderly rather than the young.