in the 21st century, the populations of the world?s nations will display large and long-lived changes in age structure. demography will matter in this century not by force of numbers, but by the pressures of waves of age structural change. in rapidly industrializing countries, demographic changes continue to have significant effects on the well-being of individuals and families, and as aggregate human and financial capital. these effects may be analyzed in terms of inter-generational transfers of time, money, goods, and services. the chapters in this volume greatly develop our understanding of the nature and measurement of transfers, their motives and mechanisms, and their macro-level dimensions, especially in the context of demographic transitions. the chapters include original empirical analyses of datasets from some twenty countries taking the reader beyond the american context in order to test the applicability of some of the theories developed on the basis of american data. they extend the traditional analysis of inter-generational transfers by examining different types of transfers, namely goods, money, assets, time, co-residence and visits. furthermore, the chapters go beyond the study of traditional parent ? child transfers to examine transfers to kins and the bi-directionality of transfers.