The world’s population is growing older–bringing a wide array of challenges to both rich and poor countries. « Global Aging: The Challenge of Success, » a report by the Population Reference Bureau, points out that people age 65 or older already make up nearly one-fifth of the population in many European countries, and that the share is rising.
Authors Kevin Kinsella, of the U.S. Census Bureau, and David Phillips, of Lingnan University, Hong Kong, argue that, before long, many industrialized countries may have more grandparents than grandchildren.
Less developed countries are also seeing their populations grow older, ushering in new social problems for societies that have few public support systems. By 2050, 1.2 billion of the nearly 1.5 billion people age 65 or older will reside in less developed countries.
Population aging has been driven by low or falling birth rates that have reduced the numbers of births each year, and improved health and medical care that have enabled people to live longer. Italy is the world’s « oldest »
major country, with nearly 20 percent of its population age 65 or older.
Japan, Greece, and Germany rank close behind.
Many European governments are concerned about the social and economic strains from the rise in ratio of retirement-age to working-age people. But Kinsella and Phillips report that analysts see little hope of slowing the aging process. European and Japanese couples would need to have many more children than they now are to interrupt the demographic momentum of aging.
And while immigration can help slow the process, immigration would have to occur on an infeasibly large scale.
Japan and many European countries are among the first to grapple with the various challenges of aging that will soon face all countries, including the United States. The United States is much younger than most other industrialized countries–one-eighth of Americans are age 65 or older.
And the graying of the U.S. baby boomers will boost the country’s elderly proportion to one-fifth by 2030, still well below the projected elderly share in Europe for that year. But this aging presents a growing burden to our social security system and public services, and is emerging as a high-profile political issue in the Bush administration’s second term.
Kinsella and Phillips point out that, while many less-developed countries have successfully lowered the high birth rates that fueled explosive population growth over the past several decades, lower fertility has caused rapid aging in some countries.
« In less developed countries as diverse as Malaysia and Colombia, older populations are expected to more than triple in size between 2000 and 2030, »
write the authors. They add that China is likely to have 349 million people age 65 or older by 2050–more than the current size of the entire U.S.
population.
Kinsella and Phillips highlight other major trends:
–The world is seeing a rapid increase in the number of the « oldest old »–people age 80 or older.
–Traditional family support systems for older people are eroding in many countries because of smaller families and highly mobile populations.
–More older people around the world live alone. More than one-third live alone in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Denmark.
–Older women far outnumber older men globally–with just 46 men for every 100 women ages 65 and older in Russia in 2004, and 71 for every 100 women in the United States.