Paul Demeny - Biography#

Paul Demeny was born in Nyiregyhaza, Hungary in 1932. He graduated from the Reformed College of Debrecen in 1951 and from the University of Budapest in 1955. He attended the Institut universitaire de hautes études internationales (HEI), Geneva, in 1957 and received a PhD in economics from Princeton University in 1961—where his mentors were Frank Notestein and Ansley Coale in population studies, and William Baumol, Oscar Morgenstern, and Jacob Viner in economics and economic history. He subsequently held appointments as assistant professor of economics at Princeton University and as associate at Princeton’s Office of Population Research. He served on the faculty of the University of Michigan (associate professor and professor of economics and associate director of the Population Studies Center), and was a visiting professor in the Demography Department, University of California, Berkeley. In 1971 he was appointed professor of economics at the University of Hawaii and founding director of the East-West Population Institute at the East-West Center, Honolulu. He joined the Population Council in 1973 as vice president and director of its Demographic Division (later the Center for Policy Studies), remaining at the Council—since 1989 as Distinguished Scholar—until his retirement in 2012.

The first issue of Population and Development Review, the journal he founded and has edited over nearly four decades, appeared in September 1975. He served as president of the Population Association of America in 1986. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and in 2003 was named Laureate of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population.