Intergenerational Fairness: A Life-Course Approach

Intergenerational fairness (IF) is a cornerstone of Europe’s long-term cohesion and resilience. Demographic change, technological transformation and fiscal pressures are reshaping how opportunities, risks and resources are distributed across generations. Yet policymakers still lack coherent tools and indicators to assess whether today’s choices secure equivalent or better prospects for those who are young now—and those yet to be born. The LIFe project addresses this gap by delivering an integrated life-course framework for analysing intergenerational fairness across seven European countries, covering education, labour markets, income, wealth, health and wellbeing. The project pursues three core objectives: (i) advancing the study of intergenerational fairness through a life-course perspective, reconstructing past and projecting future trajectories to show how inequalities within and between cohorts compound over time; (ii) creating a multidisciplinary, modular research infrastructure that synthesises insights from economics, demography, sociology, public health and political science into a common analytical system; and (iii) equipping policymakers with an open-source, cross-country microsimulation toolkit to evaluate the generational impact of policies, supported by a co-created Policy Action Plan. Methodologically, LIFe innovates by extending dynamic microsimulation (SimPaths) to combine demographic, social and economic determinants with fiscal and wellbeing outcomes, under both baseline projections and counterfactual scenarios. This infrastructure will generate harmonised indicators, country models and an Intergenerational Fairness Atlas, embedding an intersectional lens to capture the interplay of age, gender, education, household type, disability, migration status and income. Policy labs, survey experiments and stakeholder dialogues will ensure that results are accessible, transparent and aligned with administrative practices.