Background: Research on how rising human capital affects the consequences of population ageing rarely considers the fact that the human capital of the elderly population is composed in a specific way that is shaped by their earlier schooling and work experience. For an elderly population of a fixed size and age-sex composition, this entails that the higher its human capital, the greater the total amount of public pensions to be paid.
Objective: The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the link between human capital and retiree benefits and its effect on population ageing from a demographic viewpoint.
Methods: We construct an old age dependency ratio (OADR), in which each person, whether in the numerator or the denominator, is assigned the number of units corresponding to his/her level of human capital. Based on data for Italy, we study the dynamics of this human-capital-specific OADR with the help of multistate population projections to 2107.
Results: Our results show that under specific conditions a constant or moderately growing human capital may aggravate the consequences of population ageing rather than alleviate them.
Conclusions: With those findings, the authors would like to stimulate the debate on the search for demographic and/or socio-economic solutions to the challenges posed by population ageing.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:5909 |
| Date | 03 December 2014 |
| Creators | Philipov, Dimiter, Goujon, Anne, Di Giulio, Paola |
| Publisher | Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Germany (CC BY-NC 2.0 DE) |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.4054/DemRes.2014.31.44, https://www.demogr.mpg.de/de/, https://www.demographic-research.org/default.htm, http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/78478_en.html, http://epub.wu.ac.at/5909/ |
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