One of the most respected international authorities on modern demography passed away at the age of 92.
His funeral will be arranged later.
György Pál Demény graduated from the reformed high school in Debrecen, then continued his studies at the university of economics, and from 1955 he was an employee of the population statistics department of the Central Statistical Office (KSH).
Thanks to his knowledge of the French language, at the beginning of 1957 he went to a conference in Switzerland as an interpreter for one of his bosses, from which he did not return. He lived and studied in Geneva for a while and then moved to the United States.
He received his doctorate in economics from Princeton University, specializing in population studies and demography. Educated at Princeton University and then at the University of Michigan, he later became a professor at the University of Hawaii and the founding director of the East-West Population Research Institute in Honolulu.
From 1973, he was the vice-president of the Population Council in New York, and then he also won the position of director of the newly established demographic research institute, the Center for Policy Studies. In 1986, he was elected the first non-North American president of the Population Association of America.
After fifteen years, he stepped down from his leadership position, but continued to work as a senior associate and editor-in-chief of the professional journal he founded in 1975, Population and Development Review.
In addition, he taught and lectured all over the world, edited the defining journal of the profession, and assisted the work of the UN, the World Bank and other international organizations as an expert. He retired in 2012.
He was able to return to Hungary for the first time in the 1980s, and after the regime change, he became a Hungarian citizen as well as an American. In 2001, he was elected an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Shortly after his retirement, he moved to Budapest with his wife.
His main research areas are mortality tables, stable population models, estimation procedures for the analysis of demographic processes in data-deficient countries, historical demography,
the relationships between population change and economic growth and their political implications.
In 2017, György Pál Demény received the Central Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit with a star (civilian category). In 2018, he was awarded the Hungarian Order of St. István. In 2023, Katalin Novák, the head of state at the time, chose her as one of the members of the Demographic Round Table.
MTI
Featured image: The Facebook page of the Magyar Demokrata weekly newspaper
