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Population and Development Review 01/2011; 37(Suppl 1):158-70. · 2.22 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: The process of population ageing that has been occurring in Sweden can be expected to continue during the coming decades,
the population pyramid will become increasingly rectangular, and possibly even demonstrate a shrinking base. This will lead
to increasing challenges in terms of financing pensions, elderly care and healthcare. These problems will continue for at
least the next 30 years with no demographic solution available. Immigration is not likely to offset population ageing to any
larger degree, and even dramatic increases in fertility rates would take 25–30 years to have any positive effect. Since increasing
tax rates seems unlikely, the most viable solution lies in an expansion of the workforce and the resulting increase of the
tax base. If we rely solely on increasing the retirement age to provide the increased hours worked, we would need to raise
the minimum retirement age by roughly 5 years until 2050. While this might be possible, it is more likely that the solution
lies not in this or any other single measure but in a combination thereof. However, expanding hours worked not only requires
incentives but also job opportunities. Thus the policy should aim not only at expanding labour supply side but also labour
demand.
08/2010: pages 7-22;
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ABSTRACT: Population ageing is a global phenomenon, but it began earlier in Europe than in the rest of the world. By 2000, the share
of the European population above 65 years was 17 percent – a share that the global population is calculated to reach around
2050. Until recently, the increasing share of the elderly has been compensated for by a declining share of the young, leaving
the share in working age roughly constant. Now the share in working age is becoming smaller, and this poses serious challenges
to the social welfare systems developed in Europe over the past century. This is a very serious threat to the universalistic
welfare states of the Nordic countries, but it poses an equally serious difficulty for those countries in Europe where a larger
share of elderly care is performed by the family. In fact, all countries in Europe will face challenges providing pensions,
health care and elderly care as the share of elderly increases in the face of a shrinking workforce. At today’s rates, the
situation will likely be even more serious for southern European countries, where we see the most rapid population ageing.
A welfare state such as that found in the Nordic countries and, to varying degrees, throughout the rest of Europe, is characterised
by the costs of the elderly being covered largely by the public sector, which, in turn, is financed through tax revenues.
This implies that the collective wages of the workforce provide an important foundation upon which the system is financed.
If costs within the public sector rise, such as is the case when the share of elderly increases, then the tax base must grow
or the taxation levels increase. Taxes in Europe, in general, and the Nordic countries in particular, are already quite high
in an international perspective, leading our attention towards other solutions. The question then arises as to what other
solutions are available to cover these increasing costs.
06/2009: pages 117-137;
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ABSTRACT: Previous research has shown that the disease load experienced during the birth year, measured as the infant mortality rate, had a significant influence on old-age mortality in nineteenth-century rural Sweden. We know that children born in years with very high rates of infant mortality, due to outbreaks of smallpox or whooping cough, and who still survived to adulthood and married, faced a life length several years shorter than others. We do not know, however, whether this is a direct effect, caused by permanent physical damage leading to fatal outcomes later in life, or an indirect effect, via its influence on accumulation of wealth and obtained socio-economic status. The Scanian Demographic Database, with information on five rural parishes in southern Sweden between 1813 and 1894, contains the data needed to distinguish between the two mechanisms. First, the effects of conditions in childhood on obtained socio-economic status as an adult are analyzed, then the effects of both early-life conditions and socio-economic status at various stages of life on old-age mortality. By including random effects, we take into account possible dependencies in the data due to kinship and marriage. We find that a high disease load during the first year of life had a strong negative impact on a person's ability to acquire wealth, never before shown for a historical setting. This means that it is indeed possible that the effects of disease load in the first year of life indirectly affect mortality in old age through obtained socio-economic status. We find, however, no effects of obtained socio-economic status on old-age mortality. While the result is interesting per se, constituting a debatable issue, it means that the argument that early-life conditions indirectly affect old-age mortality is not supported. Instead, we find support for the conclusion that the effect of the disease load in early-life is direct or, in other words, that physiological damage from severe infections at the start of life leads to higher mortality at older ages. Taking random effects at family level into account did not alter this conclusion.
Social Science [?] Medicine 04/2009; 68(9):1583-90. · 2.70 Impact Factor
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Social Science [?] Medicine 04/2009; 68(9):1561-4. · 2.70 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: This study charts the differences between the sickness absence of immigrants and Swedes during a period when a flourishing labour market in the beginning of the 1990s turned into a tense and problematic one. We consider not only human capital factors for various immigrant groups and natives, but also workplace conditions and macro level factors. Using register based information on 100,000 individuals for the period 1992-2001, we find large differences in sickness absence between natives and several immigrant groups and that these differences persist after controlling for human capital, workplace factors, and macro economic factors.
09/2008;
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ABSTRACT: This essay explores the role played by inheritance on human longevity. We estimate a model of overall mortality among married
persons aged 50 years and above taking genetic as well as socioeconomic and environmental factors into account. We consider
whether these factors have temporary or long-lasting effects on health. The demographic and economic individual level data
come from the Scanian Demographic Database. These data cover five rural parishes in the southernmost part of Sweden for the
period 1813–1894. To these, local grain prices, as an indicator of food costs, and the local infant mortality rate, as an
indicator of the disease load, have been added. We find that age of death of the mother and the father have persistent impacts
on their adult children’s overall mortality regardless of sex, even after controlling for socioeconomic and environmental
factors throughout the life course. In addition, we find strong birth cohort effects and effects of the disease load in the
first year of life on male offspring. We are, however, unable to find any effects of socioeconomic status, neither at the
time of birth or achieved later in life, a result consistent with earlier findings.
12/2007: pages 185-201;
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ABSTRACT: In this article, we analyze fertility control in a rural population characterized by natural fertility, using survival analysis on a longitudinal data set at the individual level combined with food prices. Landless and semilandless families responded strongly to short-term economic stress stemming from changes in prices. The fertility response, both to moderate and large changes in food prices, was the strongest within six months after prices changed in the fall, which means that the response was deliberate. People foresaw bad times and planned their fertility accordingly. The result highlights the importance of deliberate control of the timing of childbirth before the fertility transition, not in order to achieve a certain family size but, as in this case, to reduce the negative impacts of short-term economic stress.
Demography 12/2006; 43(4):727-46. · 1.93 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: The importance of early life conditions and current conditions for mortality in later life was assessed using historical data from four rural parishes in southern Sweden. Both demographic and economic data are valid.
Longitudinal demographic and socioeconomic data for individuals and household socioeconomic data from parish registers were combined with local area data on food costs and disease load using a Cox regression framework to analyse the 55-80 year age group mortality (number of deaths = 1398).
In a previous paper, the disease load experienced during the birth year, measured as the infant mortality rate, was strongly associated with old-age mortality, particularly the outcome of airborne infectious diseases. In the present paper, this impact persisted after controlling for variations in food prices during pregnancy and the birth year, and the disease load on mothers during pregnancy. The impact on mortality in later life stems from both the short-term cycles and the long-term decline in infant mortality. An asymmetrical effect and strong threshold effects were found for the cycles. Years with very high infant mortality, dominated by smallpox and whooping cough, had a strong impact, while modest changes had almost no impact at all. The effects of the disease load during the year of birth were particularly strong for children born during the winter and summer. Children severely exposed to airborne infectious diseases during their birth year had a much higher risk of dying of airborne infectious diseases in their old age.
This study suggests that exposure to airborne infectious diseases during the first year of life increases mortality at ages 55-80.
International Journal of Epidemiology 05/2003; 32(2):286-94. · 6.41 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Paper for session 87 (Demographic responses to economic stress in pre-industrial Europe and Asia: A micro approach) at the 13 th Congress of the International Economic History Association, Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 2002.
07/2002;
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ABSTRACT: The importance of early life conditions and current conditions for mortality in later life was assessed using historical data from four rural parishes in southern Sweden. Longitudinal demographic and socio-economic data for individuals, and household socio-economic data from parish registers were combined with community data on food costs and disease load using a Cox regression framework to analyse the 55–80 years age group mortality (number of deaths is 1,425). Earlier analyses of the functional forms of the effect of the community variables are refined. Possible dependencies in the data due to kinship and marriage are analysed by fitting frailty models within the ordinary Cox regression model. In previous papers the disease load experienced during the birth year, measured as infant mortality rate, was strongly associated with old-age mortality, particularly the outcome of airborne infectious diseases. The impact on mortality in later life stems from both the short-term cycles and the long-term decline in infant mortality. Regarding the cycles, threshold effects were found. Years with very high infant mortality, often dominated by smallpox or whooping cough, had a strong impact, while modest changes had almost no impact at all. The effects of the disease load during the year of birth were particularly strong for children born during winter and summer. Children severely exposed to airborne infectious diseases during their birth year had a much higher risk of dying of airborne infectious diseases in their old age.
03/2002;
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Tommy Bengtsson
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ABSTRACT: By using macro-economic time series as time-varying community variables in a life event analysis framework for micro data on individuals, we have found that mortality among children over the age of one year in pre-industrial Sweden was directly dependent upon economic fluctuations, a fact which has not been demonstrated before. The impact is stronger among the lower classes than the well-to-do. It is particularly strong in years following an extremely poor harvest. Another new finding is that smallpox mortality among children is determined by economic fluctuations. However, infant mortality seems to follow its own rhythms independently of changes in economic conditions.
European Journal of Population 05/1999; 15(2):117-151. · 1.75 Impact Factor
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11/2002;
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ABSTRACT: This study identifies factors influencing the differences in utilization of sickness benefits between immigrants and natives in Sweden. The main conclusion is that the differences in consumption of sickness benefits between foreign born and Swedes, as well as between various immigrant groups are large and persist after accounting for standard human capital factors. In fact, the difference due to country of birth is larger than differences due to other human capital factors such as education and sex. It is also larger than income position and urban/rural differences. It is, however, not simply a matter of arriving as labor immigrant or asylum seeker but has a more complex pattern. This study utilizes a register-based panel containing economic and demographic information on a sample of 110,000 Swedes and immigrants from 16 countries.
Journal of Socio-Economics.
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ABSTRACT: This paper deals with socioeconomic differences in mortality among infants, children, adults, and elderly during the period of mortality decline in the nineteenth century. It uses multilevel Cox regression controlling for shared unobserved factors at the family level, and also compares the magnitude of the observed differences between socioeconomic groups with the impact of unobserved factors at family level using a new method for converting the variation stemming from unobserved factors into Median Hazard Ratios (MHR), directly comparable with relative risks. Longitudinal micro-level data for an economically transforming rural area in southern Sweden during the period 1815-1894 is used, and occupations are coded and classified using international standards (HISCO, HISCLASS). Together with information of landholding this provides high quality information on social position. The results do not support the idea that socioeconomic differences grew considerably in magnitude over the nineteenth century. For children there were clear socioeconomic differences already in the beginning of the nineteenth century, but they remained fairly constant, or even declined, over the nineteenth century. For other age groups, we do not find much in terms of social differences. For infants, other family-level variables, observed as well as unobserved, seem to have been more important than socioeconomic status in determining mortality. For adults and elderly, the models perform less well in explaining mortality, but it seems reasonable to conclude that socioeconomic status was not of prime importance for mortality in these ages, and certainly did not increase in importance over the nineteenth century.
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ABSTRACT: This paper deals with socioeconomic differences in adult mortality in southern Sweden 1815-1968, a period of transformation from an agricultural to a modern industrial society and increasing life expectancy. We use longitudinal micro-level data with information on demographic events, household structure and socioeconomic status. The main finding is that the socioeconomic gradient is a very recent phenomenon. While mortality fell in all socioeconomic groups it was not until the 1950s that a socioeconomic gradient appeared, and then only among adults in working ages. For the elderly, we find no significant mortality differentials between various social groups at any time. These results are consistent with the divergence hypothesis, although this process started much later than previously thought, and was not an immediate consequence of industrialization.
Explorations in Economic History 48(3):389-400. · 0.94 Impact Factor
