VID Colloquium
Retirement Migration of the Baby Boomers in Australia: Beach, Bush or Busted?”
Nikola Sander, VID
Date: Tue, 22 March 2011 , Time: 14:00-15:00
In the twenty-first century, Australia, like most other countries of the world, will experience an unprecedented rate of population ageing, due to declining fertility and increasing longevity. Knowledge of where the growing elderly population will live in the future is vital for the development of strategies to ensure the timely provision of adequate health, housing, welfare and aged care services. Migration of the baby boomer generation, as its members transition into retirement, will play a major role in shaping the age structure of Australia’s regions. This presentation will explore alternative future migration trajectories of this large generation based on a set of empirically-based scenarios. The populations of Australia’s regions are projected under alternative scenarios for retirement migration over the 30-year period from 2006 to 2036, by which time most boomers will have retired. The analysis is concerned with regional elderly population growth and uses census-based migration transition data in a multi-regional cohort-component framework. It is hypothesized that three fundamental issues will shape the intensity and spatial patterns of retirement migration over the period 2006 to 2036: the distinctive behaviour of the baby boomers; the changing nature of the retirement transition; and the destination choices of retirees. The results show that changes in the intensity of retirement migration and shifts in retirement age are likely to have little impact on regional population age structures, but changes in the spatial patterns of retirement migration could significantly reshape the pace of population ageing in key destinations.
About the presenter
Nikola Sander joined the VID as a research scientist in November 2010. Her current research aims to improve the modeling of international migration in global population projections by level of educational attainment. She received a Masters in Geography from the Eberhard-Karls Universiät in Tübingen, Germany, and a PhD from the University of Queensland, Australia. Ms Sander is a demographer/population geographer with a research focus on population mobility, migration, population ageing, population projections and spatial modeling of population dynamics.