Demographic Techniques of Decomposition: A New Approach and Comparing It to Previous Methods

Vladimir Canudas Romo, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

The focus of the paper is on how and why demographic measures change over time and over populations. The decomposition techniques deal with this questions by finding the additive contributions of the differences in the overall rates in two populations. The paper compares the different general methods of decomposition to a new developed technique. The answers, to how and why demographic measures change, are still internal explanations based entirely on demographic characteristics. How the structure of populations effects the dynamics of populations and how the dynamics of populations effects the structure of populations. The innovation of the new decomposition is the use of differential calculus instead of arithmetic manipulations. The new formulation of the decomposition of the change in time can be further decomposed by age groups.