Three Demographic Theories with Predictive Power: Demographic Metabolism, Demographic Transition, and Demographic Dividend

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http://eprints.org/relation/isVersionOf https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/document/111395 http://eprints.org/relation/isVolatileVersionOf https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/document/111395 http://eprints.org/relation/issmallThumbnailVersionOf https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/document/111395 archive 2 disk0/00/02/09/30 2025-10-20 09:51:09 2025-10-20 09:51:09 2025-10-20 09:51:09 monograph show 1 Lutz W. 1124 0000-0001-7975-8145 Anne Goujon, Program Director Population and Just Societies (POPJUS) Three Demographic Theories with Predictive Power: Demographic Metabolism, Demographic Transition, and Demographic Dividend pub POPJUS MDM coal phase-out, just transition, regional economy, welfare, dynamic optimization, bifurcation analysis, path dependency The discipline of demography has an ambivalent relationship to theory despite of the widely acknowledged view that every self-respecting scientific discipline needs to have a body of foundational theories. Based on Popper’s definition of a theory as containing predictive power and the definition of demography as studying changing population size and structures, this paper considers as demographic theories in the strict sense of these definitions theories that can predict population size and structures, i.e. focus on macro-level outcomes. The theory of demographic metabolism (a notion introduced by Norman Ryder) captures the essence of social change through cohort replacement in addition to transitions over the life cycle of cohorts and can deliver quantitative predictions in the context of multi-dimensional demographic modelling. The theory of demographic transition is the oldest and most prominent demographic theory, although its predictive power is limited to its irreversibility. Finally, the theory of a demographic dividend has probabilistic predictive power through the prediction that a relative increase of the more productive proportion of a population increases the chance of economic growth and improvements in wellbeing generally. In a final effort these three theories are combined towards a Unified Demographic Theory. 2025-10-15 published WP-25-004 190 public working_paper Laxenburg, Austria no info:eu-repo/semantics/book info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess