Population ageing and intergenerational relations

Ageing became a serious issue in almost all developed countries. Ageing of population brings questions regarding economic sustainability and health, social and pension systems maintenance. The article introduces concept of ageing, aged, super aged and (newly) ultra aged society. Additionally, there are presented life expectancy for 65 years old people and median age as other indicators regarding ageing. In selected European countries population has achieved the threshold of 14 % of people in the age 65 years and more and is approaching another limit: 21 %. According to projection, ageing continues fast and this proportion will grow in a short period of time. A new term is proposed in the article – “ultra aged” society, which denotes population with proportion of seniors in the age 65 years and more at the level 28 %. First population reaching this limit would be Japan. In Europe, the oldest populations are Italy, Germany and Sweden.

Cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of severe disability, which in turn creates a significant need for personal care among older adults. Children are the most important source of informal care among older adults. To facilitate care, family members may need to relocate following an adverse cardiovascular event of older adults. To measure proximity changes in response to older adults’ cardiovascular event, we explore the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a longitudinal survey of a nationally representative sample of US older adults. We identify new cardiovascular events of stroke, myocardial infarction and congestive heart failure among older adults who did not have a history of cardiovascular disease. And, we measured changes in residential proximity between older adults and their children by utilizing HRS geographic information. Results from clustered multivariate logistic regression and propensity score matching method suggest that having cardiovascular event increases the two-year predicted probability of children and adult parents moving closer to each other from 9.2% to 12.5%. Families are especially likely to migrate in response to a cardiovascular event if the older person experiencing the event is a woman, has a daughter, or has at least one child who does not work.

The objective is to discuss the contradictions and the impact on poverty reduction of the Brazilian policies aimed to replace elderly income.
Brazilian Government has made great advances in ensuring a minimum income to the elderly population. However, these policies have some contradictions. One of them
is that individuals are fulfilling the conditions for retirement too young considering that life expectation has increased and health conditions have improved. So, they receive pensions but keep working. Another one is that women start to get the benefit earlier than men. This takes place in despite of them have a higher life expectation.
It cannot be denied that these policies have fulfilled an important role in reducing poverty among the elderly. Nevertheless, it is argued that better living standard for them has brought about income inequalities among the age groups. But the nature of the two benefits is quite different. The benefit for non-elderly persons aims to take off poor individuals from this situation and to give them conditions for entering in the labor market. Its value cannot be high in order not to disincentive them to look for a job, On the other hand, the social assistance benefit for elderly population is target to a very poor group, which has certainly lost the conditions to generate their own income

This paper examines the effects of transnational migration on the families left behind, focusing on the experiences of ageing parents and strains placed on the intergenerational contract. This study draws on qualitative fieldwork initially conducted in in Chennai, India with 30 sets of parents, whose children were residing abroad as software engineers, as well as their non-migrant children. Semi structured interviews explored the effects of migration on family dynamics, with a specific focus on the experiences of ageing parents over time.

I find that the intergenerational contract in the context of traditional Indian society is strained by migration, making the analogy to a give-and-take spring where the parents are more accommodating, balancing force as the ‘givers’ supporting their children’s ambitions abroad. Parents are adopting strategies to prevent an irreversible damage to the culturally implicit contract between the generations, such as taking on new duties like becoming transnational carers to grandchildren and their children’s capital assets, as well as putting in place survival strategies such as keeping a child behind. However, as frailty and ill-health move in, there is increased demand for absent children to return to fulfill their dutiful obligations placing strain on intergenerational relationships.

Population ageing is a triumph and a challenge for development in the 21st century. The population of Russia is rapidly ageing, and with ageing progress the need for thorough analysis of this process increases. Demographic development of Russia is characterized by very high mortality difference by sex and by significant imbalance between males and females in population age composition.

The paper aims at analysing gender differences in ageing development in the Russian Federation since the beginning of the 1990s.

Changes in number and percentage of the elderly (60+) and the number of males per 1000 females in older age groups are considered. Special attention is given to gender gap in life expectancy at older ages. Regional aspect is touched on, and comparisons with developed European countries are made.

The paper is based on censuses (including the last 2010 census) and data on vital events.

Ageing process in Russia is characterized by significant imbalance between males and females in population age structure, moreover, the older is the age the greater is imbalance. Male life expectancy is lower than female one, leading to high prevalence of widowhood, the latter increasing with age. Without taking account of gender differences, ageing policies are doomed to be ineffective.

Warren C. Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov
Conventional studies of population ageing include changes in age structures but not changes in the relevant age-specific characteristics of people and, as a result, produce misleading results. Changes in the characteristics of people, such as in their remaining life expectancies, survival rates, disability rates, and cognitive abilities, for example, are all pertinent to a full understanding of population ageing. In this paper we formally develop a systematic approach to the study of population ageing that incorporates changes in the age-specific characteristics of people. We do this by generalizing the concept of age and linking these characteristic-based age indicators to new measures of population ageing. One of these indicators divides the life course into two stages, where the ratio of the durations of the two is kept constant. For example, one of these stages could be considered to be “old age”. This indicator is useful in discussions of the demographic indexation of pension ages. When changing age-specific characteristics are taken into account, we obtain a more comprehensive picture of population ageing.

In this paper, the author used a Predator-Prey Model to study how the
pension reform in China(increasing the integrated level of pension system) can influence the relationship between governments and working individuals. We separate governments as central government and local governments. The central government play a role of intelligent designer while the local governments play as predator and the working individuals are considered to be preys. We find that to increase the level of integrate of the pension system is not only necessary to build a solid social security, but also to accelerate the economy. While during the
reform, a destabilization may happen and require extra attention.

According to intergeneration flow of wealth theory of J.C. Cadwell (1976), the decision of having high fertility in the developing countries is very rational from the point of view of the elderly as they are a long-lasting support system to their parents. With rapid modernization of our society children are no longer the fixed-deposit of support of elderly even in a country like India. Isolation and helplessness have become the part and parcel of life of elderly even in modern India. This paper is an effort to quantify the level of care and support provided by the children to the elderly of the country and how this finally affects their well-being through their subjective health. The data of the recent project of UNFPA, named “Building Knowledge Base on Aging in India” is being used. Multinomial logit estimation is used, where marginal effect shows that quality of care is fast decreasing and augurs an abject state of well-being of elderly. With the expected bulge of elderly population in the coming decades, government must take some steps in advance to combat with this situation. In the light of empirical results, some policy prescription has been suggested for benefit of the elderly.

The objectives of this paper are ; (a) to trace the population aging underway in South Africa and Botswana and (b) to explain its impacts on the changing patterns of intergenerational relations.
The process of aging is slow in both countries. In South Africa, proportion of aged 65+ is 5.4 percent in 2007 while it is 5.0 percent in Botswana in 2001. The median age has increased from 15.7 years to 20.1 years in Botswana. The index of aging, defined as the proportion of population 65+ to the population aged below 15 years, has moved from 16 to 18 percent only, which , again, implies slow aging process in the country.

The process of population aging is seriously hampered by AIDS related deaths. Botswana ranks among the hardest hit with an overall HIV prevalence of 17.1 percent and in South Africa it is 11.1 percent. It appears that the impact of HIV/AIDS is comparatively higher among males.

The socio-economic impacts of the aging process ,especially on the emerging patterns of intergenerational relations, will be elaborated in the paper.

Within the wider concept of intergenerational relations, when intergenerational transmission is strong, children turn out much like their parents and social mobility is low. Such a continuity within the family and between generations in the society is identified as intergenerational attitude congruence. The main question we address in this study is whether congruence of family related attitudes is different in small families as compared to large families (i.e. where there are less or more children). The importance of intergenerational transmission processes might be accentuated in the current climate of low (and lowest-low) fertility in contemporary societies. Other than distinguishing congruence levels in mother-daughter, father-daughter, mother-son and father-son relationships, we investigate on the role of education and religiosity. In this paper, we use a multivariate approach on a large database data, the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (NKPS).