On the three properties of stationary populations and knotting with non-stationary populations (Q2008271)

The authors propose three properties related to the stationary population identity of population biology, i.e., the equality of proportions of populations at each age of a stationary population at time \(t\) and the remaining number of years left to live at each age. The authors connect this identity with stationary populations and non-stationary populations approaching stationarity. One of these properties is that the stationary population identity can be used to partition a population into stationary and non-stationary components. According to the second result, if the stationary population identity holds for a population, then it also holds for all stationary subpopulations of the original population, while it does not necessarily hold for all non-stationary subpopulations of the original population. The authors then show that, for a predominantly stationary population, the stationary population identity exists except for shorter intermittent intervals when the population is non-stationary. It is important to link the actuarial properties of populations with their age structure as the stationary population identity does, hence, a careful study of this identity may provide important new insights into these linkages. The properties obtained in the paper give a better understanding of cohort formation in real-world populations and the length of the duration for which stationary and non-stationary conditions hold.