Roundtable meeting on Demography of Sustainable Wellbeing

YoGL is based on life table methods and hence reflect the basic, but often overlooked fact that being alive is a necessary prerequisite for enjoying any quality of life. It also incorporates four central constituents of human wellbeing namely being out of absolute poverty, having good physical health, having good cognitive health, and subjective life satisfaction above a minimal level. The validity and universal applicability and acceptance of this new indicator as a global sustainability criterion are yet to be tested in different settings.

While the applicability and intercultural acceptability of YoGL will be presented and discussed in the first part of the meeting, this opportunity will also be used to strengthen the exchange of information and possible future collaboration between Population Research Centers and key demographers in the South-East Asia region.

In addition, the meeting will attempt to revive a network of population experts in the region, which started more than two decades ago as the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development with initial funding from the Wellcome Trust and coordinated by the National University of Singapore (NUS), the College of Population Studies (CPS) at Chulalongkorn University, and IIASA, with its headquarters recently moving to the Asian Demographic Research Institute (ADRI) at Shanghai University.