Making accurate predictions about population trends is difficult. However a good grasp of demographic trends is also essential both for policymakers and many companies. Changes in Iife expectancy is a relatively blunt tool for measuring the impact of interventions, such as a new drug, or safety law, on different causes of death. Séverine Arnold and her co-authors offer a more sophisticated approach which enables interventions to be measured in terms of their relative impact on the age distribution of future populations, including old age dependency ratios.

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