The social and economic developments in European countries have put pressure on their national budgets and threaten the sustainability of public policies. The traditional fiscal indicators, specifically, the deficit and the debt, which are still used today as guiding tools, have proved to be insufficient, due to their arbitrary nature and short-term focus. In this paper, we resort to an alternative fiscal indicator, known as ‘generational accounting’, which is able to incorporate the future changes in the demographic structure of the population, and their corresponding impact on public accounts. It is also able to evaluate how current fiscal policy affects, not only, current generations, but also future generations. We apply this methodology to assess the long-term fiscal situation of Portugal, and compare the results with those obtained in 1999. In this context, we also explore additional scenarios, as well as additional indicators, in order to provide some robustness to our findings. Our results show that, if the current fiscal policy is not significantly changed, future generations will face a much heavier fiscal burden than current generations.

欧洲国家的社会和经济发展已对其国家预算施加压力，并威胁到公共政策的可持续性。传统的财政指标，特别是赤字和债务，今天仍然用作指导工具，由于其随意性和短期关注点，已证明是不足的。在本文中，我们采用了一种替代性的财政指标，即“世代会计”，该指标能够纳入人口结构的未来变化及其对公共账户的相应影响。它还能够评估当前的财政政策如何不仅影响当代人，而且影响子孙后代。我们使用这种方法来评估葡萄牙的长期财政状况，并将结果与​​1999年获得的结果进行比较。在这种情况下，我们还将探索其他方案以及其他指标，以便为我们的发现提供一些鲁棒性。我们的结果表明，如果当前的财政政策没有显着改变，则后代将比当代承担更大的财政负担。