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Paper short abstract

Young people face ageing-related welfare risks and are urged to offset them through private investing. This paper reviews whether financialisation and anxiety about public pensions reshape young people’s welfare-state perceptions and policy preferences in Germany and Japan.

Paper long abstract

In public discourse, young people are usually seen as the group most affected by demographic ageing, paying higher contributions to social insurance schemes today and drawing lower benefits later in life. Governments in many countries, including Germany and Japan, have responded by advocating for private pension saving and encourage young workers to invest in capital markets and financial products in order to compensate for benefit cuts. In recent years, partly due to social media, public campaigns, and the advent of new and highly accessible forms of investing, many young people have developed a strong interest in financial markets. As stock-market valuations have grown dramatically since the global financial crisis, this may appear to many to be a more lucrative way of achieving social security than relying on established social-insurance schemes, which have repeatedly been described as vulnerable to demographic ageing. This raises the question of whether this new way of thinking about old age security, together with widespread anxiety about public schemes, affects how young people perceive the welfare state and whether it shapes their policy preferences differently from those of other generations. This paper provides a systematic overview of the mixed empirical evidence that has emerged so far in the literature, investigates how welfare-state institutions shape perceptions and preferences, and suggests new avenues for research.