Welcome

The Formal Demography Working Group aims to bring together formal demography scholars and those interested in formal demography to discuss recent and classic work, brainstorm new ideas, and to foster new collaborations. We aim to meet virtually roughly every month. Our specific aims are to:

  1. Bring an international community of scholars together with formal demography as the focus
  2. Create a supportive and inclusive environment to learn, and encourage people to work with formal methods
  3. Discuss the past, present and future of formal demography

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Next meeting

On Thursday February 5 at 10am ET Chiara Micheletti will present ‘Lessons from a Laggard? Study of CVD incidence and survival inequalities in Finland, 2000-2020, based on novel bivariate health-death distributions’. Sign up to register for Zoom link!

Abstract: Life expectancy improvements have slowed in many high-income countries since 2010, largely due to stagnating cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality. Yet, the reasons behind this slowdown remain unclear. Finland provides a compelling case: despite an historically high CVD burden, overall declines in mortality have continued. Using detailed Finnish register data from 2000 onward, we apply novel age-health curves estimating the average number of years lived CVD-free at each age at death. We compare the curves across different domains, such as sex, educational attainment and time. Results show persistent educational disparities: individuals with tertiary education consistently experience more CVD-free years than those with basic education. However, changes over time are modest, suggesting that gains in longevity have not been matched by equivalent improvements in cardiovascular health. Our findings highlight continued progress in mortality reduction, but also points towards a stagnation in CVD-free survival, underscoring the need for renewed prevention efforts.

Register interest to present

If you are interested in presenting at a future meeting, fill out this form.

Contact

This working group is organized by Vanessa Di Lego (Federal University of Minas Gerais) and Monica Alexander (University of Toronto). We are always open to suggestions and feedback.