Productive Aging

Majority of the world's ageing population live in Asia where, by the year 2000, they will constitute about 53 percent of the world total. For Asia as a whole, the number of persons aged 60 and over is projected to increase from an estimated 281 million persons in 1995 to 585 million persons in 2020. China alone, a relatively young country, had an estimated 114 million older persons in 1995, and this figure is projected to double to 231 million by the year 2020. Due to continued improvement in life expectancy, persons are living longer upon reaching old age. Consequently, persons aged 70 years and above formed more than a third of the older persons in quite a number of countries in Asia in 1995. By 2020, this proportion is expected to be about 60 percent in Japan, indicating that the number of `old-old' will exceed the `young-old.' In Thailand and Hong Kong, about 40 percent of the older people population will be over 70 by 2020. Older women, due to lower education and labour force participation, are less likely to have savings or to receive benefits from social security than men, since they tend not to be in the formal sector (see for example, Jones, 1990; ESCAP, 1994). In many countries, they also have less access to property and assets than men. Widowhood is more prevalent amongst older women than men due to the cultural norms that encourage men to marry younger wives, widowers to remarry, widows to remain unmarried, and the higher life expectancy of women compared with men (ESCAP, 1991a, p. 21). For example, a recent survey in China found that in the 60-70 age group, 50 percent of the women were widows and twenty-five percent of the men were widowers, and the widowhood rate was as high as 90 percent (ESCAP, 1989a). Similar surveys in the Republic of Korea, Sri Lanka, India and other countries in Asia also revealed a much higher prevalence of widowhood among older women than men (ESCAP, 1989b; 1989c; Concepcion, 1989, p. 42-43; ESCAP, 1994).