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WELCOME

Welcome to the August 2004 edition of Age Matters. While Maryann Wood is undertaking other duties and having a well earned break, over the next couple of months, I will be managing the National Ageing Statistics Unit. We also welcome Tara Pritchard as Director of the Population Statistics Branch in the Queensland.

Work continues on our Mature Age Profiles. The profiles, which will be released from October, 2004, analyse various components of mature age persons (those aged 45-64 years) including demographics, cultural diversity, labour force characteristics, health, housing, living arrangements and community life.

The profile analysing the mature age characteristics of the labour force will be presented at the Australian Population Association Conference in Canberra in September, 2004. At the conference, we will also be presenting a paper on the use of information technology by older people.

In this issue of Age Matters you will find the following main article of interest:

• Human Capital - an important concept in modern economics and in economic policy discourse. The ABS has produced experimental measures of the stock of human capital for Australia by measuring the stock of human capital as the discounted present value of expected lifetime labour market income. The estimates show that there has been a significant increase in the stock of human capital in Australia over a 20 year period, characterised by sharply rising shares of total human capital attributable to more educated workers. This article will show results from this study, highlighting the impact of changes in the population's age structure on human capital stocks over the past twenty years.