While an increasing absolute number of elderly – or any other age group - will inevitably increase total health care expenditure, the expenditure per capita will not necessarily increase. No firm conclusion can be drawn from the existing literature. When analysing the determinants of health care spending, a distinction should be made between individual-based analyses (micro studies) which are usually restricted to a single country, and analyses based on aggregated health care spending with countries as the unit of observation (macro studies). Micro studies are often used to make predictions of health care spending, based on assumptions on age-specific utilization rates, while macro studies are used to find economic, demographic and institutional determinants of expenditure on historical data. While micro studies are based on the demand side alone, macro studies allow for both demand and supply factors to be included.

The present session includes micro and macro analyses as well, and it addresses several key issues associated with analysis of the consequences of ageing, such as the cost of morbidity and mortality, the distance to death, non-age neutral changes of medical care over time, and inter-generational burden of health care expenditures.