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The Impact of Policies Influencing the Demography of Age-structured Populations: Lessons from Academies of Sciences

    Fernando Riosmena, Maria Winkler-Dworak, Alexia Prskawetz, Gustav Feichtinger

VID Working Papers, pp. 1-23, 2021/12/02

doi: 10.1553/0x003d08de


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doi:10.1553/0x003d08de

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the role of a diverse set of policies aimed at regulating the numberand age structure of elections on the size and age structure of five European Academies ofSciences, namely the Austrian, Berlin-Brandenburg, Russian and Norwegian academies andthe Royal Society. We show the recent pace of ageing and the degree of variation in policiesacross them and discuss the implications of different policies across these academies,regulating the number of elections and influencing their age structure. We illustrate thepotential effect of different election regimes (fixed vs. linked) and age structures of election(younger vs. older) by contrasting the steady-state and transient dynamics of differentprojections of Full Members in each academy into 2070 and measuring the size and agecompositionaleffect of changing a given policy relative to a status quo policy scenario. Ourfindings suggest that academies with linked intake (i.e., where the size of the academy belowa certain age is fixed and the number of elections is set to the number of members becomingthat age) may be a more efficient approach to curb growth without suffering any ageing tradeoffsrelative to the faster growth of academies electing a fixed number of members per year.We further note that academies need to take into consideration their current age structurebefore enacting this type of intake regime as the potential of (negative) momentum could besizable.

Keywords: Ageing, learned societies, cohort-component projections, election policies