Today about 32 million Americans are age 65 or older, and the growth of the older population is expected to accelerate sharply as the baby boom generation reaches old age. It will become increasingly important to understand how changes in the number of people and other issues affect families and society, yet great uncertainty exists about population projections. The Berkeley Center is a response to the growing demand from government agencies, Congress, and academic researchers for timely, accessible, and practical information as well as basic research. As one of thirteen centers established by the National Institute on Aging, the Berkeley Center forms part of the national infrastructure for developing the relatively new field of the economics and demography of aging.

At the core of CEDA is a group of outstanding mathematical and statistical demographers who apply their skills to a variety of research areas, including biodemography, demographic modeling and forecasting, and intergenerational transfers including fiscal accounting. This central core is enriched by other themes, notably psychological and behavioral economics with applications to survey design and health economics.

There are three major programs supported by NIA grants that help define CEDA: First, a Program Project (P01) on the Biodemography of Longevity, led by Jim Carey, which is a highly interdisciplinary project bringing together researchers from demography, biology, economics, statistics, and entomology. Second, the Human Mortality Database headed by John Wilmoth (R01) and in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, is developing a high quality data base for mortality, life tables and other demographic measures for a large number of nations, a resource that is very heavily used by researchers around the world. Third, a large international project, The Macroeconomic Demography of Intergenerational Transfers, know as National Transfer Accounts or NTA, supported by parallel grants to Lee (R37) and Mason (R01). Twenty three countries, each with its own research team, are participating in NTA and developing transfer accounts. Additional funding for some of these countries is provided by UNFPA, NUPRI and Japan, and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

The Center contributes to more efficient and better research by

• Providing infrastructural support for programming, computing and data access, thereby exploiting economies of scale
• Facilitating and encouraging interactions among members from diverse departments
• Supporting new research initiatives by funding pilot projects
• Encouraging innovation and creativity by providing resources to pursue ideas while they are fresh
• Organizing conferences on the economics and demography of aging
• Supporting junior faculty development

It disseminates research findings by

• Responding to requests from government and other agencies and from researchers for updated applications of methods and forecasts generated by CEDA members, through the efforts of a staff member
  
• Organizing conferences on the economics and demography of aging
  
• Maintaining an online working papers series.
  

It supports training of new generations of researchers

• CEDA members have organized and taught in a special summer program in formal demography
  
• CEDA staff helps to train demography graduate students in formal demography and methods generated by CEDA research
  

CEDA supports both a weekly Brown Bag seminar and a monthly BACPOP lecture series during the academic year which serve the dual functions of disseminating research findings by local and visiting researchers and training the younger generation of demographers.