Family Dynamics in China was the first English-language demographic profile by a Chinese author of contemporary population trends and family structure in China. Author Zeng Yi constructs a viable mathematical model for extending existing family status life table models to the three-generational family that is still common in China and the rest of Asia. He uses that model to compare the dynamics of family structure in China before and after the dramatic drop in fertility that followed the 1979 implementation of stringent family size limits.
Twenty percent of the world s...

People are living longer and most countries are experiencing unprecedented increases in the number and proportion of their elderly populations, resulting from declines in mortality, lower fertility, and the baby boom cohorts entering old age. A fundamental issue facing the global community is meeting the challenges of population aging and achieving healthy aging to maintain an active older population and reduce the number of disabled people. Healthy aging is obviously a major goal of all societies and is the central theme of this book.

The focus of this book is on theoretical...

People are living longer and most countries are experiencing unprecedented increases in the number and proportion of their elderly populations, resulting from declines in mortality, lower fertility, and the baby boom cohorts entering old age. A fundamental issue facing the global community is meeting the challenges of population aging and achieving healthy aging to maintain an active older population and reduce the number of disabled people. Healthy aging is obviously a major goal of all societies and is the central theme of this book.

The focus of this book is on theoretical...

Old-age survival has considerably improved in the second half of the twentieth century. Life expectancy in wealthy countries has increased, on average, from 65 years in 1950 to 76 years in 2005. The rise was more spectacular in some countries: the life expectancy for Japanese women rose from 62 years to 86 years during the same period. Driven by this longevity extension, the population aged 80 and over in those countries has grown fivefold from 8.5 million in 1950 to 44.5 million in 2005. Why has such a substantial extension of human lifespan occurred? How long can we live? In this book,...

Key research in the world s largest aging population in China has fed into this important new work, which aims to answer questions critical to older people worldwide. These include: is the period of disability compressing or expanding with increasing life expectancy and what factors are associated with these trends in the recent decades? And is it possible to realize morbidity compression with a prolongation of the life span in the future? Essential reading for gerontologists.

This book presents an innovative demographic toolkit known as the ProFamy extended cohort-component method for the projection of household structures and living arrangements with empirical applications to the United States, the largest developed country, and China, the largest developing country. The ProFamy method uses demographic rates as inputs to project detailed distributions of household types and sizes, living arrangements of all household members, and population by age, sex, race/ethnicity, and urban/rural residence at national, sub-national, or small area levels. It can also...