New approaches to assessing the population ageing process and their application for Slovakia and Europe
Abstract
Population ageing is one of the most important phenomenon of the 21st century. This is especially true for the Slovak population.
According to almost all population projections and analyzes, the population ageing process of Slovakia will become more dynamic in the next few years. All these studies of population ageing focus on only one characteristic of people-their chronological age.
Many important characteristics do not depend on the number of lived years, but on the number of years that a person will live. A new set of indicators of population ageing are based on the concept of prospective age.
In comparison to traditional measures they do not use the number of years a person has already lived, but the number of years that a person will probably live. The main aim of this paper is to present the new concept of a prospective age and to introduce new indicators that enable us to analyze the process of population ageing in a new dimension.
Supplementing chronological age with an approach that takes into account the changing life expectancy allows us to analyze ageing more comprehensively and more accurately.