10 September 2026 - As populations around the world grow older, understanding who benefits from economic growth and public policies across the lifecycle is becoming increasingly important. Nicole Mun Sim Lai of the UN DESA Population Division explains how National Inclusion Accounts (NTA-I) can reveal inequalities that conventional statistics often overlook, why this new framework matters for policymaking and how it can help countries build more inclusive and age-ready societies.
 

The world is ageing rapidly. Why do we need a new way of looking at the economic consequences of population change?

“Around the world, people are living longer and having fewer children, and societies are ageing. But population ageing is taking place in a world where substantial inequalities persist.

Traditional economic statistics tell us a great deal about the economy as a whole, but they rarely show age and inequality together. When data are not disaggregated by age and socioeconomic group, important differences can remain invisible. That makes it harder for policymakers to identify who benefits from public policies, who may be falling behind and how those patterns change as populations age.”
 

What exactly are National Inclusion Accounts?

“National Inclusion Accounts are an extension of National Transfer Accounts, or NTA. In 2013, UN DESA published a manual on NTA, which provides a framework for measuring the generational economy, including how people produce, consume, save and share resources across different stages of life.

NTA-I takes the framework one step further. Instead of looking only at differences by age, it examines the generational economy by age and socioeconomic group, such as income or education.

This year, UN DESA is publishing the National Inclusion Accounts Manual (forthcoming), which provides a standardized methodology for measuring these differences and supporting policy action that promotes greater equity across generations and population groups.”
 

What does National Inclusion Accounts data actually measure? How should we think about it?

“Start with something we all share: a common economic lifecycle. We depend on others when we're young, we produce more than we consume through most of our working years, and later in life we rely on support again through public programmes, our families or our own savings. That pattern is universal. What NTA-I shows is that within that shared pattern, people live very different economic lives depending on things like their income or education. We measure those differences directly, and it reveals how inequality actually emerges, and how resources really flow across both generations and socioeconomic groups, not how we might assume they flow.

For example, we can see stark differences across education groups in many countries. Someone with a bachelor's degree tends to earn and consume in ways that generate a lifecycle surplus, which lets them save and accumulate resources over time. Someone with less than a high school education, by contrast, may earn barely enough to cover their consumption needs, leaving little or no room to save across the lifecycle.”
 

So what kinds of questions can these data answer that we simply couldn't answer before?

“That's really the exciting part. Does public spending on education actually reach disadvantaged children? Do pension systems narrow inequality in old age, or do they widen it? And as populations continue to age, will today's inequalities grow or shrink? These are questions conventional statistics just can't answer, because they don't connect age and social group in the same dataset. One approach we use is the pseudo-Gini coefficient to get at this. In Ecuador, for example, our NTA-I analysis found that public health transfers increasingly benefited lower-income segments of the population over time.  That is one way to evaluate public transfer programmes.”
 

This sounds like it would require an enormous new data-collection effort. Is that the case?

"Actually, no. And that's by design. NTA-I is built on data that national statistical offices already collect: national accounts, household surveys and administrative records. We're not asking countries to go out and gather something entirely new. By bringing existing data together in a structured way, National Inclusion Accounts show how resources are actually shared across ages and socioeconomic groups. That gives policymakers the evidence they need to build more inclusive societies for people of all ages, without adding a heavy new reporting burden.”
 

What's next for this work?

“We're continuing the conversation in Hangzhou, China. UN DESA, together with the UN Regional Commissions for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), is convening a global conference on National Inclusion Accounts, held alongside the Asia-Pacific Regional Conference on Population Ageing in Hangzhou in October 2026. We're bringing experts and policymakers together there to share experiences and chart a path toward more inclusive, age-ready societies."

For more information: National Transfer Accounts

Access the story originally published on UN DESA Voice