Ageing households and the Nordic welfare model is a research project with participants from Finland, Denmark and Norway. It runs from June 2009 to September 2012 and is financed by NOS-HS.

Household structures are changing throughout Nordic and other developed countries. These changes – couples postponing childbearing, increasing shares of divorced and  other single mothers and fathers, more people in old age living alone – have substantial economic and social consequences. The shifts in family positions are concurrent and intertwined with other demographic changes. Increasing longevity, e.g., makes it more and more important whether people in old ages live alone or not. It is thus important to study family and household developments and other demographic changes together.

Although populations will age in the coming decades, recent studies have shown that estimates concerning the economic consequences of population aging are highly uncertain. These studies have built on quantitative research concerning the errors in population projections. Household aspects will add new dimensions to these uncertainty studies. It is important to evaluate the con-sequences of these new quantified uncertainties on the projections concerning the economic out-comes with aging populations.

We study household developments in connection with other demographic changes. Our aim is to amend the analysis of population aging and its economic consequences with the analysis of changing household structures and their economic consequences. Specific attention is paid to in-creased migration and its effects on household structures. It is likely that changes in household structures will have important implications for the sustainability of the Nordic welfare model, whose essential features are related to households and families. These include large transfers to households, publicly provided health and long-term care services, large public spending on child care and education, and extensive female participation in labour markets.

The main novelty is that the project combines statistical analysis of household types with economic analysis of population aging. Probabilistic household projections, which describe the de-velopments of different household types and quantify the uncertainty in these descriptions, will be used jointly with computable general equilibrium models and partial models describing household behaviour under uncertainty. Other novelties include advances in numerical demographic and economic models and their joint use, which in turn will result in a more realistic quantitative analysis of aging policies.

Project’s results:

See Household projections for results of probabilistic household projections for Denmark and Finland.

In Articles and reports, the nine articles produced in this project and published or forthcoming in Demography, in International Journal of Forecasting and in Nordic Journal of Political Economy are listed.