Austerity, Gender, and Multidimensional Deprivation Among Older Europeans: Evidence from SHARE

This paper studies whether fiscal consolidation is associated with deeper multidimensional deprivation among older women than among older men, and through which channel. Using six waves of SHARE across eleven European countries, it builds a multidimensional deprivation index spanning functional health, economic insecurity, and social exclusion, and relates it to the cyclically adjusted primary balance (CAPB) at the country-wave level in a two-way fixed-effects model. Consolidation raises deprivation on average with a null average gender gap, which is later found to conceal regional heterogeneity where the gender gap is positive and significant in Southern and Eastern Europe, and absent in Continental/Nordic Europe. This regional pattern holds under individual clustering but does not survive clustering at the country level. Further, the economic insecurity channel the literature would predict runs in the opposite direction, with men's measured insecurity rising more steeply than women's; this is the only dimension whose interaction survives country-level inference. Social exclusion exhibits a larger gender effect, concentrated in the Eastern and Southern Europe, but it is significant only under individual clustering. The gendered cost of austerity among older Europeans is therefore neither uniform across welfare regimes nor routed through income, though the evidence for its social channel is inconclusive.