Welcome to the fourth issue of the NTA Newsletter!

The manuscript of Population Aging and the Generational Economy was sent to the publisher Edward Elgar on November 5, 2010. Publication is scheduled for the summer of 2011. Thank you to everyone who contributed to the volume, and congratulations!

As you may have noticed from the newsletter masthead, NTA now has a logo! The logo symbolizes the Life Cycle Deficit graph. The tagline Understanding the Generational Economy emphasizes the relevance of NTA to the wide variety of issues related to the generational economy.

Winter holidays are fast approaching, so we would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone happy holidays, whether you take part in festivities or spend a peaceful time with your family or both!

Please note that this is an html email with images - you may need to adjust your email settings to view it in its intended form or view it in your browser.

What's New

Over the past few months, our NTA team in Hawaii has worked closely with a professional design firm to develop an NTA logo. We hope you like it!











Anticipating different uses for the logo and different space requirements, the designer has prepared three versions in color and in black and white. Each version comes with and without the NTA tagline. These 12 versions of the logo are now available on the NTA website. It is important to use the NTA logo correctly, whether in print or electronic format. An NTA Brand Guidelines booklet is available that explains how the logo should be used. Please follow these guidelines carefully whenever you use the NTA logo.

If you would find them useful, we would be glad to prepare logo files in languages other than English. Tim Miller and Edgard Rodriguez have already kindly provided translations in Spanish and French. Please feel free to send any requests or other feedback to Sidney. And if you do use the logo in a publication or other material, we would appreciate it if you could send us a copy (paper or virtual). It is only by seeing how the logo works in a variety of contexts that we can come up with good ideas, if needed, to make it better.

Announcements

IDRC grant

An IDRC (International Development Research Centre) grant to NUPRI (Nihon University Population Research Institute) was approved on July 17, 2010.

The grant will support work to improve data and methods for studying how structural changes influence standards of living, generational equity, and other important macroeconomic trends in East and South-East Asian countries. The project will also analyze how these countries can improve their policies in light of low fertility and other effects of population on economic growth and generational equity.

The project is designed for capacity development in selected Asian countries and has two main immediate goals:
(1) introducing NTA-related methodology and training to officials in Vietnam; and
(2) training personnel in China, India, Thailand, and the Philippines to apply the findings derived from their NTA research to policy making and assessment.
Outputs of the project will include Country Briefs and a Regional Brief, containing main findings for policy makers, and national workshops to disseminate study results to policy makers and mass media.

Participating institutions are: the Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI), Bangkok; the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bangalore; the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai; the China Center for Economic Research, Beijing; the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS), Manila; and the Ministry of Labor, Invalid and Social Affairs (MoLISA) and the Institute of Labor, Invalid and Social Affairs (ILISA), Hanoi.

Recent and upcoming events

European workshop

The Third Euopean NTA Workshop took place in Stockholm at the Institute for Futures Studies on October 29, 2010. We are very grateful to Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, which sponsored most of the workshop. Eighteen participants had productive discussions around several important issues, including but not limited to: human capital measurement in NTA, extensions to household production, approaches to create useful policy indicators based on NTA, and comparison of Swedish and Finnish NTAs during the 1990s crisis.

The template for the new European NTA website was discussed. It is still under construction but available to the public. Suggestions and comments are welcome; contact Charlotte Thulstrup.


Meeting in Cuba

NTA researchers from nine Latin American and Caribbean countries met in Havana, Cuba for a one-day NTA seminar on November 16, 2010. The seminar was held in conjunction with the IV Congress of the Latin American Population Association (ALAP). Twenty two participants attended from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, El Salvador, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, the United States, Uruguay, and the United Nations.

Country teams from Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Uruguay presented estimates of Public Transfers by Age and Socioeconomic Status. Country teams from Argentina, Colombia, Jamaica, and Peru presented estimates of NTAs for a recent year. Two new UN publications were distributed at the workshop: a special issue of a population journal, Notas de Poblacion, which presented papers from the NTA regional conference in October 2009, and a report by Andras Uthoff (Chilean economist) on the results of the first phase of the NTA project in Latin America.

Many NTA researchers presented in the population congress that followed. Luis Rosero-Bixby organized a round table on "Winners and Losers in the Demographic Transition: An intergenerational and long-run persepective", with presentations by Ron Lee on the United States, Cassio Turra and Bernardo Lanza on Brazil; and Will Dow and Luis Rosero-Bixby on Costa Rica. Ron Lee presented work on the demographic impact of financial crises at the plenary session. We had a very successful NTA seminar and population congress in Havana and we look forward to welcoming everyone to the global NTA conference in Rio in 2011.


Bangkok workshop and seminar

An NTA seminar is taking place at the Pullman Hotel in Bangkok on December 16, 2010. Keynote speakers are Dr. Naohiro Ogawa from NUPRI ("What can NTA do for Japan and other Asian countries?") and Dr. John Knodel from University of Michigan ("The well being of older persons in Southeast Asia, with a focus on Thailand"). A training workshop will follow from December 17-25 at the Marriott Hotel Hua Hin for policy makers from Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand. NTA members Amonthep Chawla (Beet), Sang-Hyop Lee, Maliki, and Mun Sim Lai (Nicole) will give lectures. Funding is provided by UNFPA (and supported by the EWC through this funding). The event is organized by NUPRI, and managed by TDRI.

Many of you wrote long papers for the book that were cut substantially to meet the length requirements for book chapters. The NTA website offers an opportunity to share your full papers with your colleagues. You are invited to post your full manuscripts as NTA Working Papers. Readers of the upcoming book can be referred to the Working Paper series for more complete coverage of your topics.

Recent papers

Window of opportunity: socioeconomic consequences of demographic changes in Brazil. 2010. Bernardo L. Queiroz and Cassio M. Turra (WP10-06).
Access paper online

From transfers to capital: Analyzing the Spanish demand for wealth using NTA. 2010. Miguel Sanchez Romero, Concepcion Patxot, Elisenda Renteria, and Guadalupe Souto (WP10-05).
Access paper online

How intergenerational transfers finance lifecycle deficit in Spain. 2010. Concepcio Patxot, Elisenda Renteria, Miguel Romero, and Guadalupe Souto (WP10-04).
Access paper online

Demographic changes and the gains from globalisation: An analysis of ageing, capital flows, and international trade. 2010. Marcel Merette and Patrick Georges. Global Economy Journal.
Access paper online (scroll down to link to paper)

Access all NTA working papers online
Access published NTA papers online

Focus on...
Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC)

The Economic Commission for Latin American Countries and the Caribbean (ECLAC) coordinates the research on the generational economy in the region.


ECLAC is one of five regional commissions of the United Nations. It was founded in 1948 with three goals; contribute to the economic development of Latin America; coordinate actions directed towards this end; and reinforce economic ties among countries and with other nations of the world. The promotion of the region's social development is among its primary objectives. ECLAC's headquarters are located in Santiago, Chile.

ECLAC, through its Population Division (CELADE) and with funds from the International Development Research Center (IDRC), has been coordinating NTA research in five countries of the region (Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Uruguay) by agreements with academic institutions with considerable experience in population and economic research. This year three new members (Colombia, Jamaica, and Peru) have joined the project.

Under the supervision of Paulo Saad (Chief of the Population and Development division of CELADE) and Tim Miller (Expert on Demography and Economics with CELADE), ECLAC has contributed to the knowledge of the generational economy in the region through its core institutional publications.

"Demographic change and its influence on development in Latin America and the Caribbean" (2008), an institutional paper, presents illustrative findings, using NTA data, on the effects of the demographic transition on key social sectors.

A special edition of Notas de Poblacion, an annual journal on population and development, was published this year describing National Transfer Accounts and their importance for public policy in five Latin American countries.

An analysis of the opportunities that demographic change provide for public education (using NTA data) was included in Social Panorama (2008), a key annual institutional report of socioeconomic conditions in Latin America and the Caribbean. In this year's issue, a chapter was dedicated to the NTA framework, reporting comparisons of transfers by age in Latin America and other regions, and an analysis of net public transfers by age and socioeconomic status using NTA estimations for Chile and Brazil.

Currently new members are estimating National Transfers Accounts for two years, and old members are constructing NTA by socioeconomic status.




All newsletters are also available on the NTA website by clicking on the Publications link in the left menu.