Warren Sanderson & Sergei Scherbov had a very interesting article in Nature earlier this year (you can find the full article reproduced here on page 5). The article title really tells the story in itself: average remaining lifetimes can increase as human populations age. Put differently, we may be facing the interesting [...]

Back in July I published a post about Austrian demographer Wolfgang Lutz’s hypothesis that those countries which sustain total fertility rates below 1.5 for any length of time may have fallen into a self-reinforcing low-fertility trap. Old Rottenhat (Ray to his friends) argued in comments that I had explained the reasons for the existence [...]

At the present time some 66 countries have fertility rates which are below the level necessary for population replacement (TFR 2.1). Within the next decade the number of counries in this group is set to grow to the point where a majority of the world’s population will be living in regions where the existing [...]

Are the good times and the good life still going to continue to roll in the Italy of the twenty first century? This is the core question the Economist’s Europe editor John Peet asks in the latest Economist Survey: Italy, Addio, Dolce Vita. As Peet says:
Italy is approaching a crunch. Rather like Venice in [...]

My preocupations about the impact of demographic change on German society are already pretty well known. Well if Germany as a whole has a sizeable problem, the former East German Lande have a huge one. The state-owned KfW development bank project in a report out today (German only unfortunately, an English version of the press [...]

That’s the dilemna posed by the latest paper from Laurence Kotlikoff Hans Fehr and Sabine Jokisch: Will China Eat Our Lunch or Take Us to Dinner. Simulating the transition paths of economies in the U.S., EU, Japan, and China the paper develops a dynamic, life-cycle, general equilibrium model to study their interdependent demographic, [...]

Swiss voters said yes in a referendum this weekend to extending an agreement with the EU on the free movement of workers to include the EU-10 ‘new accession’ members (and here). Well sort-of. They voted by 56% to 44% to gradually ease restrictions on the working rights of citizens from these countries so that [...]

In the comments to a recent post, the question arose of the “natural boundaries” of the EU. Apropos of that, let us briefly consider those parts of the EU that are outside of Europe. Sometimes very far outside.
The EU has a formal name for these territories: they are “the Outermost Regions of Europe”. [...]

As people may have noted, last weekend Tobias and I were in Stockholm. One of the topics I wanted to post on but couldn’t was the latest Human Development report from the UN. There was plenty of press coverage: here, here, and here
There was even coverage in the blogs, but the tone seemed to [...]

I’ve been in Canada for the last month, getting in my last family visit before settling in to the serious business of either going back to school or collecting unemployment checks. My family is large - Great-Grandpa had 25 children, and Grandpa had 9 - so it takes a while if you go to [...]