Comparing the burden of aging across countries hinges on the availability of valid and comparable indicators. The Old Age Dependency Ratio allows only a limited assessment of the challenges of aging, because it does not include information on any individual characteristics except age itself. Existing alternative indicators based on health or economic activity suffer from measurement and comparability problems. We propose an indicator based on age variation in cognitive functioning. We use newly released data from standardized tests of seniors' cognitive abilities for countries from different world regions. In the wake of long-term advances in countries' industrial composition, and technological advances, the ability to handle new job procedures is now of high and growing importance, which increases the importance of cognition for work performance over time. In several countries with older populations, we find better cognitive performance on the part of populations aged 50+ than in countries with chronologically younger populations. This variation in cognitive functioning levels may be explained by the fact that seniors in some regions of the world experienced better conditions during childhood and adult life, including nutrition, duration and quality of schooling, lower exposure to disease, and physical and social activity patterns. Because of the slow process of cohort replacement, those countries whose seniors already have higher cognitive levels today are likely to continue to be at an advantage for several decades to come.

Cognitive gender differences and the reasons for their origins have fascinated researchers for decades. Using nationally representative data to investigate gender differences in cognitive performance in middle-aged and older populations across Europe, we show that the magnitude of these differences varies systematically across cognitive tasks, birth cohorts, and regions, but also that the living conditions and educational opportunities individuals are exposed to during their formative years are related to their later cognitive performance. Specifically, we demonstrate that improved living conditions and less gender-restricted educational opportunities are associated with increased gender differences favoring women in some cognitive functions (i.e., episodic memory) and decreases (i.e., numeracy) or elimination of differences in other cognitive abilities (i.e., category fluency). Our results suggest that these changes take place due to a general increase in women's cognitive performance over time, associated with societal improvements in living conditions and educational opportunities.cognitive aging | gender inequality | sex differences | cross-cultural research T he magnitude, pattern, and explanation of cognitive gender differences is a topic that continues to engender considerable scientific and political debate. Here we investigate the extent to which improvements in living conditions and education, taking place over time, are associated with gender differences in cognitive functions among middle-aged and older adults in Europe.During the 20th century, there have been substantial increases in cognitive performance in many nations (1). These increases have been attributed to changes in living conditions [e.g., gross domestic product (GDP), family size, health] (2, 3) and increased exposure to cognitive stimulation (e.g., education) (4, 5). Despite these societal improvements, cognitive gender differences are still reported, typically with a life-long advantage for men in tasks assessing visuospatial (6) and mathematical (7,8) abilities, whereas women are often found to outperform men in tasks assessing episodic memory (9, 10) and reading literacy (11). In other cognitive tasks, such as category fluency and vocabulary, gender differences are typically not observed (12, 13). Although biologically based explanations for these differences have been proposed (14,15), there are also studies indicating that societal factors influence cognitive gender differences.Some studies investigating math performance in adolescents have found that gender differences favoring boys are smaller in more gender-equal societies (16,17), suggesting that gender equity positively affects girls' math performance. Others, however, have failed to find an effect of gender equity on mathematics in adolescents (11, 18) or on visuospatial performance in adults (19). These inconsistencies may reflect differences in the gender equity indicators used (20), or in sample representativeness (19), but they also point to the necessity of using indicat...

The analysis of trends in WLE at age 50, particularly when set in relation to remaining LE, provides useful insights about the development of the distribution of economically active and inactive years in Europe's aging societies.

This paper explores which demographic characteristics substantially bias self-reported physical and cognitive health status of older Europeans. The analysis utilises micro-data for 19 European countries from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to compare performance-tested outcomes of mobility and memory with their self-reported equivalents. Relative importance analysis based on multinomial logistic regressions shows that the bias in self-reported health is mostly due to reporting heterogeneities between countries and age groups, whereas gender contributes little to the discrepancy. Concordance of mobility and cognition measures is highly related; however, differences in reporting behaviour due to education and cultural background have a larger impact on self-assessed memory than on self-assessed mobility. Southern as well as Central and Eastern Europeans are much more likely to misreport their physical and cognitive abilities than Northern and Western Europeans. Overall, our results suggest that comparisons of self-reported health between countries and age groups are prone to significant biases, whereas comparisons between genders are credible for most European countries. These findings are crucial given that self-assessed data are often the only information available to researchers and policymakers when asking health-related questions.