The IPUMS International team, led by LCC Members Lara Cleveland, Matt Sobek, and Steve Ruggles, has received a new grant from the National Institute of Aging (NIA) to expand the scope of the IPUMS database and create powerful new tools for analyzing population aging. With $3.1 million in funding from NIA, the team plans to add 40 censuses and 100 million cases from Global South countries to the IPUMS database. These data will include aging-related individual-level variables and aging-related contextual variables.
The United Nations projects that the population aged 60 and older will grow by more than 50% over the next 15 years. Most of the growth of the older population will take place in the Global South, which will include 80% of the older population by 2050. The growth of the older population in Latin America, Africa, and South Asia is occurring far more rapidly than it did in the developed countries of Europe and North America. The extraordinarily rapid aging of the developing world represents one of the most significant demographic transformations in history, with profound consequences for disease and disability, intergenerational relations, work and retirement, geographic mobility, and other economic and demographic processes. This database will provide a resource of unprecedented power for understanding the effects of public policies, social institutions, and environmental conditions on the health, well-being, and functioning of people over the life course and in their later years across the developing world.