Can We Speak about a New Demographic Dividend? A Coherent Perspective from Aging Populations.

Lídia P. Tomé, Universidade de Évora
Filipe Ribeiro , Universidade de Évora

Contemporaneous populations in developed countries present lower size cohorts than ever, but new opportunities to study and evaluate population aging impacts are emerging. Despite the declining number in absolute births, increasing lifespans can create opportunities for a new demographic dividend on the top of the population pyramid by taking advantage of Oeppen’s CoDa mortality forecasting approach to forecast fertility and elaborate medium-term population projections with a coherent probabilistic perspective, and Sanderson and Scherbov’s ‘prospective age’ to measure contemporaneous population aging. With a coherent approach, we contribute with methodological advances, produce population projections, and evaluate the possible impact of COVID19 toll in future mortality and fertility. This study main objective is to evaluate the development of the Portuguese population structure over time and develop coherent population projections to 1) evaluate the real necessity of attaining the 2.1 TFR replacement level; 2) evaluate aging as a new demographic dividend for developed countries; 3) combine the cohort-component population projections method with a CoDa improvement; 4) re-evaluate population pyramid double-aging from an original perspective; and 5) to measure the COVID19 pandemic possible impact on future fertility and mortality trends. Preliminary results reveal that that current mortality and fertility trends are expected to not change dramatically to impact positively population structures. While mortality tends to overcome the impact of a recent pandemic at a slow pace, fertility presents low recovering. Old-age RLE is increasing, creating new opportunities for societies to understand the changing meaning of aging and to benefit with it.

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 Presented in Session 3. Ageing and its Consequences