Permanyer Ugartemendia, Iñaki
ICREA Research Professor at Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics (CED).
Social & Behavioural Sciences
Short biography
Iñaki is an ICREA Research Professor at the Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics since 2021. Previously, he has been a Ramón y Cajal Research fellow at the same research center and a Fulbright visiting scholar at Cornell University. He is a demographer interested in the relationship between population dynamics and individuals’ well-being. He has collaborated extensively with international institutions, like the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and UN Women. Currently, he is the Head of the “Health and Demography” Unit at the Center for Demographic Studies and is the PI of an ERC Consolidator Grant (2020-2025).
Research interests
I will research the existence of new layers of health inequality that emerge because of the ageing process unfolding across most contemporary societies. I want to focus on the following research questions: what is the extent of inequality in the distribution of healthy and unhealthy lifespans across individuals? How do these inequalities vary across countries and socio-economic groups? Are the health improvements that generate populations that are more longevous also increasing the health gaps among those groups? Amid a swift ageing process with uncertain prospects for the health status of large population sectors, it is crucial to have good measures of population health that allow addressing the demographic challenges ahead. The results of this research can be extremely useful for the design of equitable pension schemes and retirement policies that are sensitive to the heterogeneous characteristics and needs of the underlying population, and for the public provision of medical care.