Sergei Scherbov at the Shanghai Forum

The Shanghai Forum was first launched in 2005 and is an international platform for exchange among academic, political and commercial circles hosted by Fudan University and Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies. It aims at providing perspectives and advices for Asia's overall economic, political, social and cultural progress. The 2015 Shanghai Forum will be held from 22th May to 25th May in Shanghai, China.

World Population Deputy Program Director Sergei Scherbov was invited to give a presentation on reassessing aging and to participate in the round table discussion entitled “Dealing with Asia’s Aging Challenges” which will be chaired by Professor Xizhe Peng, Fudan University. The discussion will focus on latest research in this field, most effective strategies and best policy practices. It is based on three backgrounds: an updated understanding of aging, long term trend of Asia's social and economic development, and consideration of Asian culture in contrast to western culture.

Together with Warren C. Sanderson, Dr Scherbov has developed new methods of the analysis of aging that take characteristic of people into account. Their research has been published in major scientific journals, including Nature and Science. In 2012, Scherbov won an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council to explore population aging and its impacts on Europe and beyond.

For more information to the event please visit the forum webiste: www.shanghaiforum.org

Presentation Abstract

In many regions of the world, life expectancy has increased significantly in recent decades and continues to increase, as people live longer, they also stay healthier for longer. But most studies of population ageing focus on only one characteristic of people: their chronological age. The implicit assumption is that other characteristics relevant to population ageing do not change over time and place. But clearly, they do. 65-year-olds today generally have higher remaining life expediencies and are healthier than their counterparts in previous generations—which is reflected, in many countries, in rising ages of eligibility for public pensions. Many important characteristics of people vary with age, but age-specific characteristics also vary over time and differ from place to place. Focusing on only one aspect of the changes entailed in population ageing but not on all the others provides a limited picture of the process, one that is often not appropriate for either scientific study or policy analysis.

The presentation will be devoted  to the new ways of measuring ageing that more accurately represent the real world.  It will be shown that  once more adequate measures of ageing are used  past  aging  looks very different and in countries with high life expectancy almost no ageing was observed.  Future ageing trends look also much less gloomy when new indicators of ageing are used compared to a traditional approach.

Last edited: 22 April 2015