The summer school will focus on The Demography of Health and Education.
This interdisciplinary thematic focus offers an innovative approach to applying the methods of multidimensional demographic analysis to the study of human health and education with a particular view on policy challenges arising from these trends over the coming decades. In the context of rapid population ageing in Europe and East Asia, increasing attention is given to significant challenges arising in terms of future health care requirements. But the health status of a person is not simply a function of his/her chronological age. People of the same chronological age are on average in better health today than some decades ago, e.g. justifying the statement “70 is the new 60”. In addition, educational attainment has been shown to be an important source of heterogeneity with respect to health. In almost all societies more educated people of the same age have a significantly better health
status than less educated persons. Since almost everywhere the young today are better educated than the elderly, it is known for sure that the future elderly will be better educated than today’s elderly. Combined with the health advantage associated with better education, the future may look quite different when education is explicitly factored into population projections. This very timely topic lies right at the intersection of several disciplines ranging from demography to public health, to health economics and human capital analysis.
The purpose of the summer school is to acquaint roughly 20 international students at the pre-doc level with the newest research on health and disability in the context of population aging and familiarise them with the multi-dimensional methods for modelling population and human capital dynamics in a global perspective. It is structured around the REVES Meeting 2016, which is one of the world’s leading conferences on healthy aging and disability measurement. At the REVES Meeting 2014 in Edingburgh it was decided that the Meeting in 2016 will be hosted by the Vienna Institute for Demography (VID) and the Demography Group at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) in Vienna. It will take place on 8-10 June and will bring many of the world’s leading researchers in the field to the WU campus.
The REVES Meeting 2016 aims at developing a comprehensive picture of the factors decisive for human health and longevity. Papers will identify the key drivers of longer and healthier lives by explaining variations in various dimensions of health and in mortality. This includes the analysis of hitherto unexplained phenomena and paradoxes of health and longevity, among them the causes underlying unusual health and mortality patterns of subpopulations with specific health and longevity relevant characteristics, the factors determining differentials in health and mortality between population subgroups, and changes in health and longevity over time.
It is planned that 5-6 prominent international participants in the meeting will stay in Vienna for 1-2 more days and serve as lecturers in the two days preceding the conference and the three days following it. In addition, some 3-5 senior scientists from the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (The World Population Program of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis – IIASA, the Demography Group of the Vienna University of Economics and Business – WU, and the Vienna Institute of Demography – VID/ÖAW) will give lectures on topics ranging from “redefining age and aging”.