Abstract: During the Demographic Transition populations move gradually from high fertility and high mortality to low fertility and low mortality, a process that takes many decades. These changes bring deep changes in the population age distribution, the share of the young and the old in the population, leading to the “demographic dividend” when the share in the working ages rises in the middle of the transition and later to population aging when the share of the elderly rises later in the transition. This full process takes a couple of centuries to unfold and has not yet been completed by any country. Many developing countries are in the dividend phase, while the richer countries are experiencing population aging. To assess the economic implications of these demographic changes, we can combine them with estimates of economic activity-- production and consumption-- by age. The economic support ratio for a country is the ratio of producers to consumers and we can see how these ratios change over time. This shows the benefits of the demographic dividend and the costs of population aging. However, measures of economic activity do not reflect unpaid work done in the home, mostly by women, caring for children and perhaps the elderly, cooking, cleaning, shopping, and so on. Nor do measures of consumption of a meal, for example, reflect the unpaid time that has gone into shopping for food, preparing a meal, and cleaning up afterward. Here I will show standard measures of economic activity by age for many countries based on National Transfer Accounts (NTA) estimates. I will also show measures of the unpaid care work by women and men from a related project, National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTA). These are of great interest in themselves, but in addition they can be monetized and combined with the standard estimates to provide more complete measures of work and consumption by age. In these more complete estimates children’s consumption is much more costly because of parental time but costs of the elderly are little affected because the elderly meet most of their own and their partner’s time needs. With these more complete measures, fertility decline yields a larger demographic dividend while costs of population aging are somewhat reduced.
The CPop/ DaWS Interdisciplinary Lecture Series on Care and Intergenerational Justice are organized by the Societies and Demographic Change section at the Danish Centre for Welfare Studies and the Interdisciplinary Centre on Population Dynamics at the University of Southern Denmark. They bring together world-leading researchers to discuss new ways of understanding and addressing the challenges of implementing just care systems.
For additional information and information about registration please contact Lars Henrik Pedersen.