Henri Snessens tiendra le mardi 22 mars 2011 à 18 heures sa conférence inaugurale sur la démographie, les flux de capitaux et le chômage européen.

Population aging is a worldwide (albeit uneven) phenomenon. While this process has already been going on for several years, most of the effects have still to come and will considerably change the economic environment of the next decades. In many countries, the main concern is about the sustainability of public pension schemes. The problem is multi-dimensional and several, complementary approaches have been used to tackle the issues at hand.

The focus of this inaugural lecture will be on macroeconomic aspects. Macroeconomists have emphasised that population aging is likely to affect aggregate saving rates, hence interest rates, capital accumulation and aggregate income. They also have stressed the importance of cross-country interactions. Sophisticated “overlapping generations” models have been setup and used to assess quantitatively these effects. Recent quantitative analyses suggest that, in a globalised world, cross-country differences in the timing of population aging are apt to induce substantial international capital flows and resource reallocations. Although such reallocations may have little impact on the sustainability of public pension schemes, they do impact relative income levels.

 Little attention has however been paid so far to the implications of such changes for unemployment rates. When existing models are extended to include more realistic representations of the labor market (with frictions, search unemployment, early retirement), the saving and interest rate changes brought about by population aging may induce significant changes in actual (un-)employment rates. Labor market frictions also amplify international capital flows. These may generate transitory albeit longlasting cross-country differences in (un-)employment rates. This point will be illustrated with European and US data. It gives new insights on the factors that may explain the gap between EU and US unemployment rates.

Henri Sneessens is Professor of Macroeconomics at the University of Luxembourg since August 2009. He studied Economics in Louvain and Princeton and completed his PhD in Economics at CORE, Université catholique de Louvain. Before moving to Luxembourg, he was successively assistant/ full professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, the Université catholique de Lille and the Université catholique de Louvain. In Louvain, he served for seven years as head of IRES, the research center of the Economics Department. His main research interests are in macroeconomics, especially labor market and monetary policy issues.