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Iñaki Permanyer

Iñaki Permanyer

Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics

Social & Behavioural Sciences

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.

Selected publications

Permanyer I, Trias-Llimos S & Spijker JA 2021, ‘Best-practice healthy life expectancy vs. life expectancy: Catching up or lagging behind?‘, Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences Of The United States Of America, 118, 46, e2115273118.

Permanyer I & Boertien D 2021, “Global Trends in Education Inequality: 1950-2010”. Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, Vol. 22, no. 4, pp 615-646


Selected research activities

Collaboration with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and UN Women in the design and elaboration of new global indices of gender inequality and women’s empowerment, which will be released in the forthcoming UNDP’s Human Development Report (HDR).

2021 Master course: Socio-economic indicators: Theory and applications. Master Programme: European Doctoral School of Demography (EDSD), EAPS, Germany-Spain

Invited keynote speaker with the lecture “Inequalities in health, longevity and healthy longevity” within the conference New data for the new challenges of population and society. Organized by Università degli Studi di Padova. Virtual event, September 22-24, 2021

Invited as an international expert to give the talk On the measurement of healthy lifespan inequality at the Workshop on New Perspectives on Lifespan Inequality, organized by the the Herczeg Institute on Aging at Tel Aviv University in collaboration with the University of Southern Denmark and Oxford University. Virtual event, January 21, 2021

“Comparative analysis of son preference in Indian immigrants in Spain, USA and Canada: The role of parental education, age, place of birth and endogamy”, and “Mortality and morbidity drivers of the global distribution of health”, and “Best-practice healthy life expectancy vs life expectancy: catching up or lagging behind?”, and “Will half of the 2000 birth cohort reach 100? Yes, but probably only in the world’s most longevous Regions”. Presented at the IUSSP International Population Conference 2021. Virtual event, December 5-10, 2021

ICREA Memoir 2021