Posts
Much attention has been given to aging populations in developed countries, but nations in virtually every region of the globe have to deal with similar demographic trends. The only parts of the world not experiencing below-replacement fertility are sub-Saharan Africa and most of the Arab Muslim world. Everywhere else—East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Latin America—birth rates are below replacement, and apparently set to decline further.
When birth rates fall below replacement level, within a decade or two, a significantly larger proportion of the population will become elderly. If birth rates do not increase above replacement, total population generally begins to decline within about a generation.
Welfare systems in wealthier nations face costly adjustments to aging populations. Income support and medical care programs will soon be stretched to the limit. Difficult changes will have to be implemented to keep the programs afloat. Poorer nations, however, even now do not have social safety net programs that developed nations do. Grim times are ahead as their populations age.
The burdens of pronounced population aging . . . are unlikely to be born as easily by countries still poor as by countries already rich. Simply stated, societies and governments have fewer options for dealing with the problems imposed by population aging when income levels are low — and the options available are distinctly less attractive than they would be if income levels were higher.
Nicholas Eberstadt has written a lengthy paper on the demographic outlook for three populous low-income countries: China, Russia, and India. He does not paint a pretty picture.
China faces an extremely rapidly aging population within the next twenty years, mostly because of the effectiveness of its coercively enforced one-child-per-family policy. By 2025, China is projected to have less than 20% of the earth’s population but more than 25% of its elderly (aged 65 or over). Mr Eberstadt argues that aging trends will not be spread evenly throughout the country, but concentrated in poorer areas.
Senior citizens will not be taken care of by China’s public pension system, which already is an unsustainable financial mess. People will try to fall back on the traditional support system: the family. But the one-child policy has crippled the Chinese family’s ability to take care of the aged. There simply are not enough children to take care of the all the elderly. So, China’s elderly can look forward to extending their working lives to support themselves. In rural areas, older workers tend to be poorly educated farm labourers performing low-paying but physically arduous tasks. This produces what Mr Eberstadt calls the “triple bind” of China’s aging problem.
In the years ahead, China’s senior citizens are not only likely to face real and perhaps mounting pressures to support themselves through paid labor, and not only likely to find that their employment opportunities are principally in low-paying, physically demanding jobs; they are also likely to be less healthy and more fragile than counterparts in other countries where the physical demands of employment are much less forbidding for the elderly and nonelderly alike.
A large population of poverty-stricken and infirm aged could well emerge as China’s major social problem within a few decades.
Russia and India will also have to deal with rapidly increasing numbers of elderly without the wealth available to Western nations confronted with similar demographic trends.
via Arts & Letters Daily.
Previous related posts:
