Booms, Busts and Population Aging. The importance of the past.

A rapid process of aging currently visible everywhere in the developed world promises to be one of the major social and economic issues affecting societies for much of the twenty-first century, in particular in the coming decades. This process is not uniform, a fact that conditions its socioeconomic impact and leads to different types of policy. It can be shown that the specific shape of the aging process is the result of the way each country underwent its own particular cycle of fertility boom and fertility bust in its more or less recent past. In this paper time series data from a set of 24 countries in the developed world will be used in order to assess the way they underwent the boom and bust cycle and how this cycle affects the process of aging currently and in the future. Measures of the intensity and duration of both boom and bust will be proposed and results discussed. It will be shown that the intensity of the baby bust tends to be closely linked to the intensity of the baby boom, and both are linked to pre-war fertility levels. Policy implications of different patterns of aging will be discussed.