The future paths of population ageing result from specific combinations of declining fertility and increasing life expectancies in different parts of the world. Here we measure the speed of population ageing by using conventional measures and new ones that take changes in longevity into account for the world as a whole and for 13 major regions. We report on future levels of indicators of ageing and the speed at which they change. We show how these depend on whether changes in life expectancy are taken into account. We also show that the speed of ageing is likely to increase over the coming decades and to decelerate in most regions by mid-century. All our measures indicate a continuous ageing of the world's population throughout the century. The median age of the world's population increases from 26.6 years in 2000 to 37.3 years in 2050 and then to 45.6 years in 2100, when it is not adjusted for longevity increase. When increases in life expectancy are taken into account, the adjusted median age rises from 26.6 in 2000 to 31.1 in 2050 and only to 32.9 in 2100, slightly less than what it was in the China region in 2005. There are large differences in the regional patterns of ageing. In North America, the median age adjusted for life expectancy change falls throughout almost the entire century, whereas the conventional median age increases significantly. Our assessment of trends in ageing is based on new probabilistic population forecasts. The probability that growth in the world's population will end during this century is 88%, somewhat higher than previously assessed. After mid-century, lower rates of population growth are likely to coincide with slower rates of ageing.

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Adjusting aging forecasts to incorporate increases in longevity and health can provide better tools for policy-makers.

Using demographic multi-state methods for back projecting the populations of 120 countries by age, sex and level of educational attainment from 2000 to 1970 (covering 93 percent of the 2000 world population), this paper presents an ambitious effort to reconstruct human capital data which are essential for empirically studying the aggregate level returns to education. Unlike earlier reconstruction efforts, this new dataset jointly produced at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) gives the full educational attainment distributions for four categories (no education, primary, secondary and tertiary education) by five-year age groups and with definitions that are strictly comparable across time. Based on empirical distributions of educational attainment by age and sex for the year 2000, the method moves backward along cohort lines while explicitly considering the fact that men and women with different education have different levels of mortality. The resulting dataset will allow new estimates on the impact of agespecific human capital growth on economic growth and first results show-unlike earlier studies-a consistently positive effect.

In this paper, we derive a discrete choice model of the demand for medical care from a theoretical model that implies a natural interrelation between price and income. We show that, in the context of a discrete choice model, if health is a normal good, then the price elasticity of the demand for health care must decline as income rises. This implies that the models in previous discrete choice studies which restrict the price effect to be independent of income are misspecified. The model is estimated using data from a 1984 Peruvian survey, and a parsimonious flexible functional form. Unlike previous studies, we find that price plays a significant role in the demand for health care, and that demand becomes more elastic as income falls, implying that user fees would reduce the access to care for the poor proportionally more than for the rich. Our simulations show that user fees can generate substantial revenues, but are accompanied by substantial reductions in aggregate consumer welfare, with the burden of the loss on the poor. These results demonstrate that undiscriminating user fees would be regressive both in terms of access and welfare.

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Using West German panel data constructed from the 1988 and 1994/ 1995 wave of the DJI Familiensurvey, we analyze the stability and determinants of individuals' total desired fertility. We find considerable variation of total desired fertility across respondents and across interviews. In particular, up to 50% of individuals report a different total desired fertility across survey waves. Multivariate analysis confirms the importance of background factors including growing up with both parents, having more siblings, and being Catholic for preference formation. Consistent with the idea that life course experiences provide new information regarding the expected costs and benefits of different family sizes, the influence of background factors on total desired fertility is strong early in life and weakens as subsequent life course experiences, including childbearing, take effect. Accounting for unobserved individual heterogeneity, we estimate that an additional child may increase the total desired fertility of women with children by 0.14 children, less than what conventional estimates from cross-sectional data would have suggested.