Population Change among the Elderly: International Patterns

Abstract

Modern demography is, above all, about demographic transition. This is to be understood in two distinct, but interrelated senses. First, there is description in the spirit of the narrow, literal definition of demography—a description of quantitative aspects of human populations. … On a more ambitious level, there is the task of explanation. —Demeny (1968: 502) In his brilliant editorship of Population and Development Review, Paul Demeny encouraged both types of research on demographic change. This essay is in the spirit of the first type of study. Rather than dealing with the entire population, however, it restricts its attention to ages above 65, where population changes reflect, amplify, and reshape the broad patterns associated with the demographic transition. In this study, we develop and apply a demographic accounting model adapted to the segment of the population above age 65. Through an assessment of the terms in this model, we estimate the contribution of contemporaneous factors and their historical antecedents to rates of growth of the older population. Background In a population with fixed age-specific rates of fertility, mortality, and migration, all age groups grow at the same rate (Sharpe and Lotka 1911). Such a demographic regime characterized most of human history over broad sweeps of time and space. Starting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, relatively steady declines in mortality began in Western countries. Such declines typically increased growth rates at ages under five years and above 60, the ages of greatest vulnerability to death (Coale 1972; Coale and Demeny 1983). These declines were followed after some decades by declines in fertility. Initially, fertility declines reduce only the growth rate at age zero, but eventually such reductions become visible throughout the age structure by reducing the number of

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