Consequences of Aging Population

8 Key excerpts on "Consequences of Aging Population"

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  Handbook of Rural Aging

  • Lenard W. Kaye, Lenard W. Kaye(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Aging populations in rural areas are generally understood to live in a wide range of smaller, dispersed, less-densely populated, and under-serviced settlements (Skinner & Winterton, 2018). The majority of rural populations are clustered in the vicinity of metro areas given historical settlement on farms and in mill towns to produce goods for nearby urban centers (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019). However, communities, regions, and states vary widely in how rural they are, as do the natural climates, topographies, demographics, sociocultural fabrics, and local economies of these areas (Krout, 2017). Thus, the experiences and needs of older adults in rural communities also vary widely.

  Geographic Implications for Rural Aging Populations

  Given increased risk for multiple health conditions and reduced mobility (including losing the ability to drive), older adults may be particularly susceptible to and influenced by their rural surroundings. Commonly cited geographic challenges are that distances to destinations are greater and places more isolated. This makes it more difficult to access and secure resources necessary for health and quality of later life, including housing, healthy foods, transportation services, social opportunities, health care, caregiving, and community services (Skoufalos et al., 2017). Rural older adults’ spaces of care are more likely to encompass voluntary sector or informal supports as a result, including delivery of goods, services, and care by family members and friends (Bascu et al., 2012). With out-migration of younger generations for education and employment, however, older adults are less likely to have proximal connections to assist with care and services (Skinner & Winterton, 2018). This socio-geographic isolation coupled with the dispersion and relative lack of infrastructure, services, and amenities often results in significant social isolation for rural older adults (Kaye, 2017). The result is a “double-jeopardy” scenario (Joseph & Cloutier-Fisher, 2005), in which rising numbers of older adults, many of whom have multiple health conditions, are aging in increasingly vulnerable communities with declining tax revenues struggling to provide necessary services and supports. The risk of residential home admission increases with level of rurality given fewer resources to address the in-home needs of older adults (Gilbert, Todd, May, Yardley, & Ben-Shlomo, 2010). As a result, it may not be feasible or safe for older residents to continue living independently in their rural homes and communities to age-in-place.

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  Ageing

  • Christopher Phillipson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  Part I Demographic and Social Dimensions of Ageing 2 Ageing Societies in a Global Perspective

  Introduction

  The twenty-first century has witnessed the emergence of population ageing as a global economic and social trend. Most countries in the world – even those with long-established older populations – are still in the process of adjusting to the implications of the changes involved. These are likely to be substantial, reaching into all aspects of cultural, economic and social life. Yet it is important to provide a balanced assessment of the type of challenges that demographic change will bring. Issues concerned with maintaining health and social care will doubtless occupy a prominent place in debates and will be discussed at different points in this book. But ageing populations will be transformative for society in various other ways, bringing innovative lifestyles, creating different types of communities and relationships, expanding the range of leisure and cultural activities and developing new institutions.

  As will be argued, there are in fact many different paths likely to be followed by ageing populations. These will reflect factors such as social and cultural variations across different societies, contrasting levels of resources within and between countries, differences in the speed of demographic change and contrasting attitudes towards older people and the idea of ageing. The purpose of this chapter is to review the key demographic drivers behind population ageing, setting these within the broader global context which forms the organizational framework for this book. The chapter first reviews the development of population ageing, defining in the process what is meant by the term ‘ageing societies’. It goes on to survey contrasts between different societies – both within high-income countries and in comparison with low-income countries of the global south. We will also consider gender and social class variations in life expectancy, and the rise of the very elderly population (including the increasing number of centenarians). The discussion then places population change within a sociological context, examining questions about the link between the development of ageing and individual beliefs and attitudes. Finally, the chapter considers a theme which will be returned to at various stages throughout the book: Why are ageing populations often presented as a ‘problem’? What is the historical context for this? What alternative arguments might be developed in response to such views?

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  The Social Context of Ageing

  A Textbook of Gerontology

  • Christina Victor(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 The demographic context

  Much of the stimulus for the development of social gerontology as an academic discipline, and as an area of social and political concern, has come from the increase in the number and proportion of the population categorised as 'old' or 'elderly'. Indeed issues concerned with the demography of ageing are central in understanding many of the social, political and policy-related issues characteristic of twenty-firstcentury Britain. The backdrop for much political and policy-related debate is the concern about 'the demographic time bomb'. This is a rather pejorative term for the changing age composition of our population and of the balance between different age groups. As this chapter demonstrates, over the past 150 years there has been a profound change in the age composition of the British population with the 'ageing' of the population and a decrease in the number of children. This is represented in some quarters as an impending social disaster for two reasons. First, 'ageing' populations are attributed many of the negative stereotypes given to ageing at an individual level. All the negative attributes ascribed to an individual older person have been transferred to ageing populations. These are characterised as lack of energy, enthusiasm, innovation and artistic and intellectual achievement. Ageing populations are seen as being unresponsive to change and traditional in approach. Second, the increase in the number of older people is seen as having negative, perhaps even dire, consequences for the social and health services. These arguments taken together have been used to describe what Jefferys (1983) termed the 'moral panic' of population ageing which focus upon the perceived 'burden' which the increased numbers of older people will impose upon the state and younger people. Another way of describing this negative perspective is apocalyptic demography (Vincent, 1999) — the perception that we will be overwhelmed in social, political and welfare terms by the increasing numbers of old people.

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  Soziologie - Sociology in the German-Speaking World

  Special Issue Soziologische Revue 2020

  • Betina Hollstein, Rainer Greshoff, Uwe Schimank, Anja Weiß, Betina Hollstein, Rainer Greshoff, Uwe Schimank, Anja Weiß(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Oldenbourg

    (Publisher)

  3 observed, there is a structural lack of solutions for the problems of negative population growth in modern societies, that is, in societies that are bent on solving all problems via growth (115). He postulates that―contrary to population growth, which leads to stimulating diversity―depopulation is associated with consolidating or even intensifying social and regional inequalities.

  4.3  Longevity and social structures

  While the demographic and social effects of low fertility rates on the age distribution of a population have been intensively analyzed, the second dimension of demographic aging―increasing life expectancy―has been less discussed. In the context of increasing life expectancy, one has to mention the internationally widely cited article by Jim Oeppen and James Vaupel (2002) , which at least partly originated within Germany (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock). Their research indicates a surprisingly linear increase in life expectancy over the last one hundred and fifty years when we look not at single countries but at those countries that have experienced the highest average life expectancy during a given time period.

  What is even more interesting from a sociological perspective is the effects of increased life expectancy on life phases and social structures. One of the most elaborate German works on the relationships between increased life expectancy and social structures in modern societies is the analysis by Helga Pelizäus-Hoffmeister (2011) . Drawing on an earlier paper by Martin Kohli (1985) , she reflects on, from a socio-structural perspective, how high life expectancy is interrelated with important dimensions of modern life, such as career planning, concepts of lifelong learning, saving for retirement, and so forth. In line with other sociologists (e. g., Höpflinger, 2016

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  Ageing Populations and Changing Labour Markets

  Social and Economic Impacts of the Demographic Time Bomb

  • Stella Vettori, Stella Vettori(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8 In this context the ageing population might cause some social and economic implications but in this study we will focus on only the economic implications of the ageing population.

  The economic impacts of the ageing populations can be listed like below:9

  • reduced labour force participation rates and labour force flexibility as the workforce itself ages and the proportion of people retired increases; • reduced savings and investment as older persons stop saving and spend less on housing and education and more on current consumption, including personal care; • increased social expenditure by government, especially in health outlays, pensions and direct aged care services; • reduced taxation revenues to government as taxable incomes fall in retirement, threatening to produce deficits.

  The economic consequences as mentioned above can be classified into two basic parts related to macro-economic impacts: fiscal impacts and economic growth impacts. In this part, these two basic parts will be discussed separately.

  FISCAL IMPACTS

  The ageing of populations could have dramatic effects on government finances. The fiscal impacts of ageing population can affect both public revenues and expenditures. Government revenues will be adversely affected as the large increase in the level of aged population. After retirement age people pay less tax than during their working period. Thus an ageing population will impact the supply side of the economy by slowing the growth of the labour force. These effects emerge in two ways: i) a lower fertility rate will slow the inflow of younger people into the labour force; and ii) older and soon to be more populous aged cohorts tend to have weaker labour force attachment, and therefore the participation rate of the labour force as a whole may decline. As growth of one of the primary production inputs slows, so too will the pace of economic growth. As the growth rate of total economic activity slows, so too would income and consumption growth. This could feed into the whole spectrum of income and consumption taxes and slow government revenue growth to rates below those experienced historically. The personal income tax system may provide less revenue in coming years due to the maturing earnings profile of the individuals that make up the tax base. This effect would be expanded by the progressiveness of the personal income tax system, with lower tax rates for individuals earning lower levels of income. An ageing population may also have effects on consumption tax yields. Consumption patterns tend to follow lifetime earnings patterns. If this consumption pattern is maintained, then consumption tax yields may also fall as the population structure matures.10 On the other hand, countries whose revenues are based more on consumption or value added taxes may tend to experience less of deterioration in revenues than those that depend more heavily on income or payroll taxes.11 Tax revenues tend to be collected from working cohorts of the population and transfers are made to elderly members. Any imbalances between revenues and transfers would result in government budget imbalances and changes in government debt stocks, which in turn could have significant macroeconomic effects.12

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  Why Demography Matters

  • Danny Dorling, Stuart Gietel-Basten(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  In the post-industrial countries, ageing has been presented as an existential threat to the very viability of a future welfare state and health-care system. The burden of ageing on every aspect of public expenditure is picked over and analysed in academic, popular and policy documents and discussed on a daily basis in some news story somewhere in the world. The capacity of states to provide adequate pension coverage or universal health care, in the context of ever more complex and expensive medical treatments, clearly looks threatening given what appears to be an exponential increase in the number of older people. In many poorer countries, meanwhile, the threat from population ageing is generally related more to the apparent lack of capacity to provide cheap labour to fuel economic growth, rather than to sickness, and often poverty, in old age.

  To put it simply, the prevailing view of population ageing is based on an outmoded, increasingly inappropriate view of what it means to be ‘old’. In this vein, we discuss some alternative ways of conceptualizing what being ‘old’ might mean in the twenty-first century – taking into account the huge changes in life expectancy that have occurred in recent decades. Apart from in the UK and US, with their current health and political crises (Hiam et al., 2017a), these increases as yet show little sign of abating in the majority of countries worldwide. Building on this, we then explore some other ways of assessing the changes over recent decades, and those projected into the future, which are likely to fundamentally alter how we envisage ‘old age’. We also consider how preventive medicine and preventative social policy can shape an alternative future – developing the notion, presented in Chapter 3

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  World Economic Outlook, September 2004 : The Global Demographic Transition

  • International Monetary Fund. Research Dept.(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND

    (Publisher)

  Much of the focus of the aging policy debate has centered on the potential for rising pension outlays. Yet population aging will also have important implications for health care systems in both industrial countries and emerging market and middle-income countries. While aging itself will increase health care outlays, the principal challenge for governments in the years ahead will be to address the key nondemographic factors that have continued to increase the cost of medical care. This box discusses some of the key issues with regard to the impact of aging and other factors on health care systems.

  Do the Elderly Consume More Medical Care?

  In industrial countries, the elderly population—those over 65—spends more on medical care than those under 65. Thus, an increased share of the elderly in the population should imply, all other things equal, an increased average level of medical care spending. But this inference may be misleading; the higher average spending level may be simply due to a significant share of lifetime medical care costs being incurred in the last year(s) of life. If an increased share of the elderly had no effect on the death rate, then the increased share would only affect medical spending if those elderly not in their last years of life spend more, on average, than the working-age population.

  Evidence that is just emerging suggests that people are living longer and healthier lives, in part because they are exercising more, smoking less, and watching their weight.1 Access to high-quality medical care for prevention, diagnosis, and treatment and the availability of new pharmaceuticals is also contributing to additional healthy life years. But the elderly still appear to have a higher average demand for medical care in their later years (excluding the last year of life) in terms of ambulatory, inpatient, and long-term chronic care, than those under age 65. As people become very old, they seem to be subject to more disabling conditions that can require longterm care (which may require the time of those who would otherwise be fully in the labor force). Whether, additionally, the death rate will rise with an increasing elderly share (increasing the weight of those high-cost medical years) will depend on the balance between an increasing elderly population share and increasing life expectancy (which reduces the share of those elderly in their last year of life!).2

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  A Planet of 3 Billion

  Mapping Humanity's Long History of Ecological Destruction and Finding Our Way to a Resilient Future | A Global Citizen's Guide to Saving the Planet

  • Christopher Kevin Tucker(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Atlas Observatory Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 11   The Geopolitical Implications of Population Decrease

  As we see around the world, various nations are already grappling with a decrease in population. There will always be domestic politics around this issue. The basic decennial reapportionment of representative democracy using a census will guarantee some level of tumult in those countries that enjoy such a system of governance. And there will always be resource implications when older generations require the financial support of smaller, younger generations. But what would be the geopolitical implications of worldwide population decrease? There are so many levels to this issue, but a few glimpses are instructive.

  Beyond the softening of fossil fuel commodity prices associated with the rise of renewable energy sources, continuous decline in demand due to population decrease would have huge economic implications for nations that depend on oil revenues. There is a much more complicated energy transition already under way, putting long-term pressure on fossil fuel prices. Population decrease and the resulting decrease in consumption will only place additional downward pressure on prices. For those nations in which oil revenues are the only thing helping them deal with continuous population growth, how will that play out? And as the United States and European countries wean themselves off of fossil fuels, due to both renewable energy growth and population decrease, their geostrategic interests in the Near East will change materially.

  For other nations, population growth and ethno-nationalism have been inextricably tied—even though it has often been more of an unreflective assumption than an explicit strategy. Hindu nationalists of the 20th century, when seeking to counterbalance or outnumber Indian Muslims and their Pakistani Muslim neighbors, were not displeased by runaway population growth, as though it would be a solution to communal violence. And India collectively seemed more than comfortable to have aggressive population growth that matched that of its northern rival China, as though masses of undernourished, uneducated peasants would win some future war for India. China seemed content to see its population grow, as living standards steadily rose from 1950 to 1980, until it became clear that its population was going to outstrip available resources. Similarly, over the past few decades, many Muslim-majority nations have seemed set on outnumbering their regional rivals, with explosive population growth rates and the resulting young populations. Some, like Iran, have even recently changed their family planning policies to induce population growth.

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