Longevity and the Aging Swedish Population

Göran Broström, Umea University

This paper is focusing, first, on the very concept of aging, what does it mean for a population, and what does it mean to an individual. Second, on the individual level, is longevity clustering within certain family trees? These questions are central to a project within the research environment Ageing and Living Conditions, hosted by the Centre for Population Studies, Umeå University, Sweden. In the first part, the Swedish population is followed over time from 1850 to 2050, and the main findings are that the age distribution is gradually changing from one where the large age groups are the young ones, to a more uniform distribution, and that only net inmigration saves the population from slow extinction. In the second part, which is more methodological, focus is on development of models for interaction between demographic processes over generations. Early results indicate, e.g, that longevity seems to cluster within families.