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The Impact of Population Ageing on Household Structure: Evidence from the Czech Republic

Publication at Faculty of Science |
2014

Abstract

Although the impact of population ageing on future population trends is broadly studied in many countries and research agencies these days, less is known about its effect on household structure. But understanding future development in family and household structure is a crucial issue to examine the socio‐economic, environmental and other implications of population dynamics.

Therefore, the main objective of our contribution focuses on current and future household structure in the Czech Republic which underwent profound transformation process after the downfall of communism in 1989. Due to changes in population census methodology which belongs to main data sources, the whole analysis deals with housekeeping households.

The number, size and distribution of housekeeping households in the Czech Republic till 2040 are projected based on official population projection issued in 2013 and modified headship rate method which is recurrent and reflect the overall average household size. The method advantage is in its sensitivity to demographic change while headship rates can remain less affected.

In addition, to avoid inconsistency the conditional shares of households among households of the same or larger size introduced by household projection for Austria in 2007 are utilized. The preliminary results, in medium variant, show moderate increase in the total number of housekeeping households in a given period.

The one‐person households are expecting to be the main contributors to that increase.