Bernhard Babel

Future life expectancy in Australia, Europe, Japan and North America

Human life expectancy has risen in most developed countries over the last century, causing the observed demographic shifts. Babel, Bomsdorf and Schmidt (forthcoming) introduce a stochastic mortality model using panel data procedures which distinguishes between a common time effect and a common age effect of mortality evolvement. Using this mortality model, the present paper provides forecasts of future life expectancy for 17 countries divided into 12 regions: Australia, Alps, Bene, Canada, England and Wales, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Scandinavia and the United States of America. We consider (traditional) period life expectancies as well as cohort life expectancies, the latter being a more realistic approach but less common. It turns out that a continuing increase of life expectancy is expected in all considered countries. Further, we show that the probabilistic uncertainty of forecast life expectancies is different if either period life expectancies or cohort life expectancies are considered and, moreover, the uncertainty increases substantially if the error of parameter estimation is included.

Care Need Projections for Germany until 2050

Populations of many highly developed countries face the problem of an ageing society, i.e., the share of senior citizens in the total population increases. A common measure for quantifying this effect is the old-age dependency ratio (ODR) which gives the ratio of the number of people aged 65 and over to the number of people between ages 20 and 64.