MPIDR Technical Report

An Excel spreadsheet for the decomposition of a difference between two values of an aggregate demographic measure by stepwise replacement running from young to old ages

Abstract

A general algorithm for the decomposition of differences between two values of an aggregate demographic measure of age and other dimensions is realized as Excel/VBA. It assumes that the aggregate measure is computed from similar matrices of discrete demographic data for two populations under comparison. The algorithm estimates the effects of replacement for each elementary cell of one matrix by the respective cell of another matrix. The replacement runs from young to old ages.