PenAgeing

This Proof of Concept grant awarded by The European Research Council (ERC) will develop further the groundbreaking research done as part of the ReAging project that produced new measures of population ageing appropriate for 21st century conditions.

Demographic changes in survival rates and age structures require adaptions in public policies. Recently changes in pension policies have been driven by financial considerations and have aroused a great deal of dissent. One reason for the unhappiness with proposed pension reforms is that they place the burden of reform inequitably.

In this grant, IIASA researcher team led by Sergei Scherbov will produce a detailed case study of equitable pension ages and present an innovative methodology that produces scenarios of equitable normal pension ages using the details of a specific pension system. This grant shows how fairness can enter public policy discussions of ageing.

In the future, new problems with respect to population ageing could arise and new data will certainly become available. In the ReAgeing grant, many new measures of population ageing were produced that took the changing characteristics of populations, such as remaining life expectancy and health into account. The presentations were based on data that were available at the time of writing. In order for the results of the ReAgeing grant to remain relevant a second innovation is required, a way to keep the new measures of population ageing up-to-date. The researches will do this with two pieces of software that can immediately be updated every time the UN produces a new round of data. While we cannot predict exactly how demographic conditions will change, with the newly developed pieces of software we can be sure that we will have the tools to deal with them.

The new research plans to use Austria and Russia as case studies to develop tools that provide policymakers with fair normal pension ages and consistently up-to-date measures of population ageing that consider the changing characteristics of populations.

Last edited: 01 June 2021