Aging Demographic Data Sheet 2018

The Aging Demographic Datasheet 2018 shows population aging trends and projections until 2050 with a focus on traditional and alternative indicators of population aging for the current and future population changes across the world.

The new measures recognize that groups of people in different countries and in different years may have aged at different rates. They do this by taking differences in remaining life expectancy and other changing characteristics of people into account. Conventional measures of population aging provide a biased picture of the extent of population aging in the future because they ignore those important differences. The Aging Datasheet 2018 shows the magnitude of that bias by comparing estimates and forecasts of population aging which adjust for differences in relevant characteristics of people with analogous measures that do not.

The datasheet presents adjusted and unadjusted data for all countries of the world and all continents. It features ranking and graphs, and contains a detailed glossary.

The work on the data sheet was led by World Population Deputy Program Director Sergei Scherbov, expert in this fields of demographic modelling, population projections, data processing and presentation, and measuring aging. For many years Scherbov and Warren Sanderson have developed new measures of age and aging in demographic research. Their groundbreaking research has been published in major scientific journals, including Nature and Science, and have only recently been included in the UN report on aging.

The data sheet was developed in the framework of and presents the results of the European Research Council funded Reassessing Ageing from a Population Perspective (Re-Ageing) project at IIASA that, among other things, ascertains the extent to which advanced societies are actually aging in multiple dimensions, including health, cognitive abilities, and longevity. 

Download the Aging Demographic Data Sheet 2018 here

Last edited: 08 March 2018