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April 2024

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...

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...

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...

March 2024

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

Ageing and the climate crisis

It’s no secret that the population is getting older. According to the World Health Organisation, between 2020 and 2050 the global number of people aged 60 and over will rise from 1 billion to 2.1 billion. Many wealthier countries already have disproportionately weighty older populations: where I live in Wales, over-60s are predicted to make up around 30% of the population by 2026. Now the rest of the world is catching up: by 2050, two thirds of over-60s worldwide will live in what...