Prevalence and Economic Costs of Absenteeism in an Aging Population—A Quasi-Stochastic Projection for Germany
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Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, Epidemiology Department, 38124 Brunswick, Germany
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Chair of Empirical Methods in Social Science and Demography, Faculty of Economics and Sociology, University of Rostock, 18057 Rostock, Germany
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Chair of Economics, Faculty of Economics, FOM University of Applied Sciences, Hochschulzentrum Bremen, 28359 Bremen, Germany
4
Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Forecasts and Macroeconomic Analyses Department, 90478 Nürnberg, Germany
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editor: Han Lin Shang
Forecasting 2022, 4(1), 371-393; https://doi.org/10.3390/forecast4010021
Received: 20 January 2022
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Revised: 5 March 2022
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Accepted: 7 March 2022
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Published: 15 March 2022
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers of Forecasting 2022)
Demographic change is leading to the aging of German society. As long as the baby boom cohorts are still of working age, the working population will also age—and decline as soon as this baby boom generation gradually reaches retirement age. At the same time, there has been a trend toward increasing absenteeism (times of inability to work) in companies since the zero years, with the number of days of absence increasing with age. We present a novel stochastic forecast approach that combines population forecasting with forecasts of labor force participation trends, considering epidemiological aspects. For this, we combine a stochastic Monte Carlo-based cohort-component forecast of the population with projections of labor force participation rates and morbidity rates. This article examines the purely demographic effect on the economic costs associated with such absenteeism due to the inability to work. Under expected future employment patterns and constant morbidity patterns, absenteeism is expected to be close to 5 percent by 2050 relative to 2020, associated with increasing economic costs of almost 3 percent. Our results illustrate how strongly the pronounced baby boom/baby bust phenomenon determines demographic development in Germany in the midterm.
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Keywords:
cohort-component method; multivariate methods; time series analysis; Monte Carlo methods; stochastic forecasting; demography; statistical epidemiology; labor market research; health economics
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MDPI and ACS Style
Vanella, P.; Wilke, C.B.; Söhnlein, D. Prevalence and Economic Costs of Absenteeism in an Aging Population—A Quasi-Stochastic Projection for Germany. Forecasting 2022, 4, 371-393. https://doi.org/10.3390/forecast4010021
AMA Style
Vanella P, Wilke CB, Söhnlein D. Prevalence and Economic Costs of Absenteeism in an Aging Population—A Quasi-Stochastic Projection for Germany. Forecasting. 2022; 4(1):371-393. https://doi.org/10.3390/forecast4010021
Chicago/Turabian StyleVanella, Patrizio, Christina B. Wilke, and Doris Söhnlein. 2022. "Prevalence and Economic Costs of Absenteeism in an Aging Population—A Quasi-Stochastic Projection for Germany" Forecasting 4, no. 1: 371-393. https://doi.org/10.3390/forecast4010021
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