Definition: Total age-dependency ratio

Category: Demography

A measure of the age structure of the population. It relates the number of individuals who are likely to be "dependent" on the support of others for their daily living – the young and the elderly – to the number of those individuals who are capable of providing this support. 

The total-age-dependency ratio is the ratio of the sum of the number of young and the number of elderly people at an age when both groups are generally economically inactive, compared to the number of people of working age. It is the sum of the two ratios, the young-age-dependency ratio and the old-age-dependency ratio. http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Glossary:Total-age-dependency_ratio