Policy Implications of Global Aging

As late as the early 1980s, the global population could be characterized as "young": 35 % of all persons were age 0-14 and 8.5% were aged 60 and over, according to United Nations estimates. While aging trends were already becoming marked in more developed regions (15% of their population were in the 60+ age group), the less developed regions, which account for nearly three-fourths of the total world population, were exceedingly youthful: 39% of their aggregate population was in the 0-14 age group and only 6% in the 60+ group. This youthfulness caused policy-makers to focus attention on such issues as birth control, child and maternal health, education and other services to growing cohorts of the young and to pay relatively little attention to the longer-term consequences of successful birth control programs and improved life expectancy at birth, namely, the increasing relative weight of the elderly in the population and the growing numbers of persons surviving to reach old age.

As we are getting closer to the new century, policy makers have "discovered" that the world's population is aging. Exactly what global aging will mean is hard to predict. It is however generally assumed that global aging will have an effect on labor and the economy, on housing, on health care, on social services, and on the "welfare state." It can also be assumed that living longer will have a personal effect on our lives.