From Retirement to Active Aging: Changing Images of ‘Old Age’ in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries

Abstract

Europe is aging. Though admittedly to a differing extent, most if not all European societies are confronted in the foreseeable future with a changing age structure of their populations — and with a gradual acceleration of demographic change. In 2012 (most recent data), none of the EU countries statistically reached a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 2.1 (considered to be the replacement level fertility rate), the average rate being 1.58.¹ In 2013, the proportion of the European population aged 65 and over averaged 18.2 per cent, ranging from Ireland’s 12.2 per cent and Slovakia’s 13.1 per cent to Germany’s 20.7 per cent and Italy’s 21.2 per cent. Life expectancy at age 65 amounted statistically, on European average, to 18 years for men and 21 years for women in 2012, and the ‘old-age-dependency ratio’² is projected to rise from 27.5 in 2013 to values of about 40 in 2030 and nearly 50 in 2050.³ Somehow or other, countries all over Europe share a common fate: they are irrevocably on their way to turn into ‘aging societies’.