On Estimating the Expectation of Life at Old Ages: Reply to Professor Coale

In 1758, an article containing the view that resources limit population growth was published in Copenhagen. This paper gives a short presentation of the author Otto Diderich Lütken's life and literary production. His radical views on the question of population are given, and a comparison is made with the theories of Thomas Robert Malthus. A brief account of his views on other economic issues is also presented. The literature concerning his writings is reviewed. A discussion of who influenced him, and of his influence on others, ends this paper.     

流迁老年人口研究:国外文献评述

目前国内老年人的流动与迁移行为较少被关注,有必要对这一问题重新加以认识。对国外相关文献进行检索与评述,从研究对象、主要研究内容、关注焦点、迁入地与迁出地、迁移原因、老年人流动迁移行为的经济后果等角度总结目前的国外文献研究成果,并提出对我国相关领域研究的借鉴意见。     

Risk Exposure in Early Life and Mortality at Older Ages: Evidence from Union Army Veterans

This study examines the relation between risk exposures in early life and hazard of mortality among 11,978 Union Army veterans aged 50 and over in 1900. Veterans' risk exposures prior to enlistment—as approximated by birth season, country of birth, residential region, city size, and height at enlistment—significantly influenced their chance of survival after 1900. These effects are robust irrespective of whether socioeconomic well‐being in 1900 has been taken into account; however, they are sensitive to the particular age periods selected for survival analysis. Whereas some of the effects such as being born in Ireland and coming from large cities became apparent in the first decade after 1900 and then dissipated over time, the effects of birth season, being born in Germany, residential region in the United States, and height at enlistment were more salient in the post‐1910 periods. Height at enlistment shows a positive association with risk of mortality in the post‐1910 periods. Compared to corresponding findings from more recent cohorts, the exceptional robustness of the effects of risk exposures prior to enlistment on old‐age mortality among the veterans highlights the harshness of living conditions early in their lives.     

关于高龄老人生活质量现状的思考

1998年山西省高龄老人健康长寿抽样调查问卷中,对生活现状的自我评价栏目的调查数据与目睹的现状是不相吻合的,有些情况甚至是截然相反.本文试图分析探讨产生这种状况的原因.     

中国高龄老人生活质量研究

高龄老年人口是老年人口中寿命较长及最脆弱的社会群体.他们的生活质量如何是一个国家的经济和社会发展水平、社会文明程度的重要标志.鉴于有关老年人口特别是高龄老年人口生活质量的评价至今国际社会还没有较成熟的权威性量表,以及"中国高龄老人健康长寿基础调查"资料的限制,本文就上述调查所提供的资料,对中国80岁及以上高龄老年人口的生活质量做初步探讨.     

Development of Life Satisfaction in Old Age: Another View on the "Paradox'

Empirical evidence of no age-related decline in life satisfaction (LS) in old age contrasts with frequently observed declines in the objective quality of elder people's lives and has therefore been labelled a "paradox' and interpreted in terms of stability of LS in the respective gerontological discussion. However, as this evidence was mainly derived from cross-sectional age group comparisons, it does neither clearly indicate the absence of age-related mean level change, nor intra-individual stability of LS. Thus, the development of LS in middle and late adulthood was analysed longitudinally by using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. Based on single item measures of LS across 16 repeated panel waves with one per annum (1984–1999), autoregressive (quasi-Markov) structural equation models were used to estimate true score variances and intra-individual true score stability in one-year intervals. Research questions concerned (a) "monotonic' stability and variance in a subsample of old respondents (born before 1925) as compared to the total sample and (b) change in stability and variances in old age. Results indicate high "monotonic' true score stability of LS over the whole adult life span, whereas mean levels declined slightly in old age. No striking evidence for age-related changes in variance or stability was found.     

高龄老人生活质量的分析

本文通过对248名八旬老人与437名七旬老人的生活质量(QOL)与生活满意度(DSL)的调查分析,发现八旬老人生活质量不如七旬老人,但生活满意度却优于七旬组;八旬老人呼吸系统与五官科疾病多见,但影响八旬老人生活质量的主要疾病是心脑血管疾病与糖尿病;婚姻状况对老人的生活满意度有重大影响.     

中国高龄老人健康预期寿命研究

用隶属等级 (GradeofMembership ,GOM)模型将反映 1998年被访高龄老人不同健康维度的 5 0个变量进行综合得到健康、比较健康、功能受限、体弱多病、极度虚弱五个纯类。用这五个纯类将高龄老人预期寿命进行了分析     

Ansley J. Coale on Increases in Expectation of Life and Population Growth

The rapid decline in mortality after the end of World War II, in combination with a much slower downward adjustment of fertility, resulted in an extraordinary acceleration of world population growth. In a contribution prepared for the 1959 Vienna conference of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, Ansley J. Coale présented a concise and spirited exploration of the influence of mortality and fertility on the levels and patterns of growth and on the distribution of the population by age. Using the stable population model as his tool of exploration, Coale présents a comparative analysis of the implications of movements between stable states, making imaginative illustrative assumptions on changes over time and highlighting the often surprising and counterintuitive results of such calculations. The full text of this article, omitting summaries in English and French, is reproduced below from pp. 36–41 in Union Internationale pour I?étude scientifique de la population, Internationaler Bevölkerungskongress, Wien:Im Selbstverlag, 1959. Ansley Coale was one of the most prominent figures in demography in the second half of the twentieth century. He was born in 1917 and was educated at Princeton University. He spent his entire professional career at Princeton, as a member of the economics faculty and in association with the Office of Population Research, of which he was director from 1959 to 1975. In 1967/68 he was president of the Population Association of America, and from 1977 to 1981 he was president of IUSSP. His many scientific works include Population Growth and Economic Development in Low‐Income Countries (1958), coauthored with Edgar M. Hoover, a book that was highly influential in shaping the international population policy agenda from the 1960s on—lately receiving renewed attention as a predictor of the “demographic dividend” benefiting economies as a result of the transition to low fertility. He was initiator and leader of the Princeton project exploring the causes of the decline in marital fertility in Europe, culminating in the 1986 book, coedited with Susan C. Watkins, The Decline of Fertility in Europe. His most lasting contribution to population studies, however, was in the field of formal demography, as both teacher and scholar. His research in this area is exemplified by the 1972 book The Growth and Structure of Human Populations: A Mathematical Investigation, and in the application of demographic models to the estimation and analysis of population data. Ansley Coale died on 5 November 2002, at the age of 84.     

The Relationships between Activity and Quality of Life for Older Men and Women at Different Ages in Taiwan

This study investigated the relationships between types of activity and quality of life (QOL) for older men and women at different ages. Based on cross-sectional data that included 220 community-dwelling elderly persons aged 65 and older in southern Taiwan, the results showed that the participation rates in many activities declined with age for both genders. Social activity and solitary leisure activity were significantly associated with QOL for old-old men, but not for young-old men. Only social activity was significantly associated with QOL for young-old women, but there was no significant association between any activity and QOL for old-old women.     

Estimating the Reliability of Single-Item Life Satisfaction Measures: Results from Four National Panel Studies

Life satisfaction is often assessed using single-item measures. However, estimating the reliability of these measures can be difficult because internal consistency coefficients cannot be calculated. Existing approaches use longitudinal data to isolate occasion-specific variance from variance that is either completely stable or variance that changes systematically over time. In these approaches, reliable occasion-specific variance is typically treated as measurement error, which would negatively bias reliability estimates. In the current studies, panel data and multivariate latent state-trait models are used to isolate reliable occasion-specific variance from random error and to estimate reliability for scores from single-item life satisfaction measures. Across four nationally representative panel studies with a combined sample size of over 68,000, reliability estimates increased by an average of 16% when the multivariate model was used instead of the more standard univariate longitudinal model.     

Estimating Increment-Decrement Life Tables with Multiple Covariates from Panel Data: The Case of Active Life Expectancy*

A fundamental limitation of current multistate life table methodology-evident in recent estimates of active life expectancy for the elderly-is the inability to estimate tables from data on small longitudinal panels in the presence of multiple covariates (such as sex, race, and socioeconomic status). This paper presents an approach to such an estimation based on an isomorphism between the structure of the stochastic model underlying a conventional specification of the increment-decrement life table and that of Markov panel regression models for simple state spaces. We argue that Markov panel regression procedures can be used to provide smoothed or graduated group-specific estimates of transition probabilities that are more stable across short age intervals than those computed directly from sample data. We then join these estimates with increment-decrement life table methods to compute group-specific total, active, and dependent life expectancy estimates. To illustrate the methods, we describe an empirical application to the estimation of such life expectancies specific to sex, race, and education (years of school completed) for a longitudinal panel of elderly persons. We find that education extends both total life expectancy and active life expectancy. Education thus may serve as a powerful social protective mechanism delaying the onset of health problems at older ages.     

Ageing,Health and Life Satisfaction of the Oldest Old: An Analysis for Germany

This analysis uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to assess the effect of ageing and health on the life satisfaction of the oldest old (defined as 75 and older). We observe a U-shaped relationship between age and levels of life satisfaction for individuals aged between 16 and 65. Thereafter, life satisfaction declines rapidly and the lowest absolute levels of life satisfaction are recorded for the oldest old. This decline is primarily attributable to low levels of perceived health. Once cohort effects are also controlled for, life satisfaction remains relatively constant across the lifespan.     

Estimating Quality of Life and Place with Location Theory: The McBucks Index

This paper explores the changes in inequality and welfare between EU regions at the NUTS 3 level over the 2003–2011 period. Changes in absolute and relative inequalities are broken down into components explaining the effects of population change, re-ranking of regions and income growth between regional per capita incomes. Each component of inequality change is further decomposed by subgroup, revealing the contributions arising from changes within subgroups and from changes between subgroups. The decomposition of the change in absolute inequality is used to develop a decomposition of the change in welfare between EU regions.     

Risk of Developing Dementia at Older Ages in the United States

Dementia is increasingly recognized as a major source of disease burden in the United States, yet little research has evaluated the lifecycle implications of dementia. To address this research gap, this article uses the Aging, Demographics, and Memory Study (ADAMS) to provide the first nationally representative, longitudinal estimates of the probability that a dementia-free person will develop dementia later in life. For the 1920 birth cohort, the average dementia-free 70-year-old male had an estimated 26.9 % (SE = 3.2 %) probability of developing dementia, and the average dementia-free 70-year-old female had an estimated 34.7 % (SE = 3.7 %) probability. These estimates of risk of dementia are higher for younger, lower-mortality cohorts and are substantially higher than those found in local epidemiological studies in the United States, suggesting a widespread need to prepare for a life stage with dementia.     

Surplus Chinese Men: Demographic Determinants of the Sex Ratio at Marriageable Ages in China

We explore the demographic factors contributing to China's unbalanced sex ratio at marriagable ages. We develop a stable population model of the sex ratio at marriagable ages, and compare a series of population projections with alternative underlying assumptions about the key demographic inputs. The stable population model demonstrates that several demographic factors interact to influence the sex ratio at marriagable ages, including the sex ratio at birth, population growth, the age gap of marriage partners, and the sex ratio of survival from birth to marriageable age. The population projections further demonstrate that policies that seek to reduce the sex ratio at birth and the age gap at marriage and, to a lesser extent, increase fertility would be most effective at alleviating the problem. But no demographic changes are likely to occur quickly enough to balance the sex ratio at marriagable ages in the near future.     

上海市高龄老人生活质量及其社会政策支持

本文利用上海市老龄科研中心1999年进行的"中美高龄老人比较研究调查"的数据资料,对上海市高龄老人的生活现状进行了多因素分析,研究了高龄老人生活满意度与其文化程度、经济状况、健康状况和邻里熟识程度的关系,并对上海市目前高龄老人的政策支持状况进行了分析.