Variation in cognitive functioning as a refined approach to comparing aging across countries

Abstract

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.

Education, Elderly Health, and Differential Population Aging in South Korea: A Demographic Approach

“…Here, we focus on the ratios of college-educated offspring to the unhealthy elderly. This can be an alternative measure of population aging similar to cognition-adjusted dependency ratio (CADR) (Skirbekk, Loichinger, and Weber 2012). An advantage of our measure is to account for changing configuration of offspring's generation as well as elderly health.…”

“…Population aging, however, also occurs in tandem with other socioeconomic changes such as educational expansion and improvements in health, which may mitigate the consequences of rising dependency ratios. Skirbekk, Loichinger, and Weber (2012) proposed a new measure of population aging-the cognition-adjusted dependency ratio (CADR)-and showed that the ranking for degree of population aging depends upon the measures: whereas India has fewer elderly people per working-aging individual than the U.S., the U.S. has fewer cognitively-limited elderly people per working-age individual than India. There is also evidence that increasing human capital per capita may offset the loss of total economic product due to fertility decline in a population level (Lee and Mason 2010) and the cost of supporting an elderly population may be reduced as the health of the elderly has continued to improve over decades (Martin, Schoeni, and Andreski 2010).…”

A unifying framework for the study of population aging

“…For example, cognitive functioning is studied using one set of measures (Weber et al 2014;Skirbekk, Loichinger and Weber 2012;Schneeweis, Skirbekk and Winter-Ebmer 2014;Stoet and Geary 2013;Flynn 1987), and physical functioning is studied using another set of measures (Leong et al 2015;Sanderson and Scherbov 2014;Al Snih et al 2004;Habibi et al 2013;Innes 1999). It might be possible to determine that both cognitive and physical functioning improved over time in a particular country, but even in that case there would be no natural way to compare these changes.…”

Macroeconomics, Aging and Growth

“…Difficulties like these have led some analysts to study direct measures of ability by age, for example performance in athletic events or in chess (Fair, 2008;Skirbekk, 2004), or cognitive ability (Skirbekk et al, 2012). Pekkarinen and Roope (2012) use piece rates for Finnish blue collar workers and fund that hourly productivity rises up to age 40 and then remains constant.…”