Faster Increases in Human Life Expectancy Could Lead to Slower Population Aging |
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| Authors: | Warren C. Sanderson Sergei Scherbov |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Economics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, United States of America.; 2. World Population Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria.; 3. Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, VID/ÖAW, WU), IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria.; City University of New York, UNITED STATES, |
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| Abstract: | Counterintuitively, faster increases in human life expectancy could lead to slower population aging. The conventional view that faster increases in human life expectancy would lead to faster population aging is based on the assumption that people become old at a fixed chronological age. A preferable alternative is to base measures of aging on people’s time left to death, because this is more closely related to the characteristics that are associated with old age. Using this alternative interpretation, we show that faster increases in life expectancy would lead to slower population aging. Among other things, this finding affects the assessment of the speed at which countries will age. |
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