April 2024
22Apr

Less than half of Malaysians are insured as we become an ageing society

Less than 50% of Malaysians are insured, according to insurance industry players. They said that getting insurance is especially important for the public to shield themselves from unexpected illnesses in old age as the country moves toward an ageing society. Insurance industry players said medical claim payouts had increased in the last two years, with a surge of 14.9%, from RM13.4bil in 2022 to RM15.4bil last year. They also pointed to the 41.4% hike in disability payments and a 26.2% rise in...

April 22, 2024
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18Apr

The Future of a Hyper-Aging Society Navigated by Well-Being Technology

Today, humanity is experiencing a paradigm shift and transitioning to a new era. We live in a world where every person’s well-being - the happiness of the body and mind - is impacted by social environments born of numerous changes, including an aging and increasingly diverse society, changes to how and where we work, and outbreaks of emerging diseases. This changing panorama is raising people’s interest in well-being technology, as well as its value and importance. “Well-being technology” describes...

April 18, 2024
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15Apr

Why richer, older China needs changes to its social contract

No one likes getting old. The pains and strains of becoming elderly wear on us. The worries about how to ensure we can provide for ourselves in old age looms largest of all, as countries’ birth rates fall Nowhere feels this more acutely than China, where a staggering 300 million peopleminimal or no pensionsmaller families The challenges are multifaceted. The government needs to build out rather than restrict the social safety net of pensions and healthcare for this growing segment of the country’s...

April 15, 2024
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15Apr

U.S. More people are working well past retirement age. It’s not easy

Hope Murray retired in 2013 after a 50-year career that ranged from game show producer to Hollywood party planner to casino executive. She settled into a life of golf, game nights and pickleball in her San Diego community, her daughter living nearby. Then things got more expensive. Gas was nearly $5 a gallon, medication costs were adding up, the grocery bill was increasing. So she downsized, stopped driving as much and waited longer between haircuts. But she could no longer afford some of...

April 15, 2024
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March 2024
27Mar

Older Workers, Pension Reforms and Firm Outcomes

By Francesca Carta, Francesco D’Amuri & Till Von Wachter Using Italian matched worker-firm data, this paper quantifies the effect of an exogenous increase in older workers driven by an unexpected raise in statutory retirement ages on medium and large firms' input mix and economic outcomes. Data on lifetime pension contributions are used to calculate the expected additional number of older workers retained by each firm due to the pension reform. Instrumental variable estimates show an increase in older workers leads...

March 27, 2024
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25Mar

Nursing homes can’t meet the care needs of an aging population

Where are we going to get the workers to care for us? How are we going to pay them? Long-term care is one of the major challenges facing an aging society. Care can take the form of a nursing home, formal care provided in the community or home, or informal care provided by family or friends. KFF recently released a really nice summary of the state of play on the nursing home front in the process of describing a proposed rule...

March 25, 2024
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21Mar

Global fertility rates to plunge in decades ahead, new report says

A new study projects that global fertility rates, which have been declining in all countries since 1950, will continue to plummet through the end of the century, resulting in a profound demographic shift. The fertility rate is the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime. Globally, that number has gone from 4.84 in 1950 to 2.23 in 2021 and will continue to drop to 1.59 by 2100, according to the new analysis, which was based on the Global Burden...

March 21, 2024
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21Mar

Africa Is Aging. Will It Become A Real Population Bomb?

Africa is the most youthful continent, with 70% of sub-Saharan Africa under age 30. With high fertility rates and objections to birth control, the youth population will continue to grow. Investing in young people is important for the continent’s transformation, but Africa also needs to prepare for a growing older population that will present new issues in the decades ahead. By the end of this century, Africa will be home to almost 40% of the world’s population, including a 15-fold growth in older adults, from...

March 21, 2024
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19Mar

Tutoring the Elderly Is Growing Fast in China

China's rapidly aging population is fueling a promising and fast-growing market for companies providing recreational classes and activities for the elderly middle class, from yoga to African drumming and smartphone photography. The growth potential of the industry contrasts sharply with the decline of the after-school private tutoring sector following a government crackdown in 2021 aimed at boosting record low birth rates by lowering education costs. "Education industries are transitioning to the silver economy," said Qiu Peilin, the Beijing head of Mama...

March 19, 2024
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14Mar

East Asian societies have the world’s lowest birth rates—and are learning that ‘throwing a bit of money’ at the problem isn’t solving anything

Governments across Asia—in Singapore and Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul—are facing a crisis: plummeting birth rates. For several decades now, people in East Asian economies have had fewer and fewer children. Last year, South Korea beat its own record for having the world’s lowest birth rate, reporting 0.72 births per woman for 2023, down from 0.78 in 2022. Singapore reported 0.97 births per woman, the first time the rate has fallen below one. Japan has one of the world’s oldest populations, with a median age of 49.5. Hong Kong, Taiwan,...

March 14, 2024
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