Abstract
This chapter analyzes some of the demographic complexities in the dynamic process of population ageing in industrialized countries. It demonstrates, using the United Nations population projection results, that age-structural transitions involve the movement of waves and troughs through the age pyramid and that there are variations in the speed and timing of transition and the intensity of the waves. The analysis finds that in the majority of developed Western countries the modal age groups will remain below old age or even as low as early middle ages, which is a markedly different picture produced on the basis of the conventional demographic measure such as the proportion 65 and over. At the end-point of an age-structural transition, the conventional demographic index tends to produce a bleak outlook, leading to an over-dramatization of the ageing issues and to panic among policy makers. As an important policy implication, Pool stresses that the multiple age compositional oscillations to be generated in the process of population ageing would require public and private responses that could lead to reallocations of resources between generations. In addition, as demographic policy responses to population ageing, he discusses the feasibility of promoting international migration and boosting fertility. It is axiomatic among demographers that declining fertility, not increased life expectancy, is the principal determinant of population ageing. It should be emphasized, however, that the contribution of mortality improvement to the ageing process becomes increasingly important over time, especially when life expectancy at birth exceeds 70 years. In Japan, for example, the mortality effect on population ageing is expected to become dominant over the fertility effect sometime between 2005 and 2010. For this reason, accurate projection of the future mortality trajectory is increasingly important for social security reform in Japan. This observation applies to many other industrialized countries.
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- 1.
The WDCs here include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. We have excluded the minor western and southern European jurisdictions, such as Andorra or San Marino. Data used here on the WDCs relate to the sum of the countries, not the average across the countries.
- 2.
These are most widely analysed in financial terms in generational accounting exercises. In this paper we are viewing intergenerational competition as a far more complex social, cultural and economic (as well as financial) phenomenon.
- 3.
All data used here are drawn from the United Nations medium projection series, 1998 Revision.
- 4.
The groupings were based on a scatter gram between when 25% or more of the population in a country were aged 60 years or over and when 10% or more were aged 75 years or more. Group one consists of countries that reach these reference points between 2005 and 2015 in the first case, and between 2010 and 2020 in the second. The second group spans 2015 to 2025 for age group 60+ years, and 2025 to 2030 at 75+. The third group runs from 2025 to 2040 for 60+ years, and from 2035 to 2045 in the case of age group 75+.
- 5.
Data on the WDCs as a whole reflect to a degree the experience of the largest country, the United States.
- 6.
(P,x,t+n – P,x,t)/ (Sum Px, t+n – Sum Px,t). That is the proportion of the total population change in any time period contributed to by any age group x.
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Acknowledgements
Sandra Baxendine, Research Statistician, Population Studies Centre, provided the technical and computing support for this paper. I have a particular debt of gratitude to her for this work, and for the many suggestions and comments she made. I wish very much to thank my colleague at the Centre, Dr. A. Dharmalingam who commented on an early draft of the paper. The general research programme of which this paper is a product was funded by the New Zealand Foundation for Research Science and Technology.
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Pool, I. (2010). Age-Structural Transitions in Industrialized Countries. In: Tuljapurkar, S., Ogawa, N., Gauthier, A. (eds) Ageing in Advanced Industrial States. International Studies in Population, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3553-0_1
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