In case you are utilizing chronological age as a proxy for when folks cease working, that additionally varies rather a lot by nation and over time (and is, after all, significantly delicate to adjustments within the state pension age). How significant is an “old-age dependency ratio” that classifies the over-65s as “dependent” in a rustic such because the UK, the place the proportion of 65 yr olds in employment has risen from 27 per cent in 2014 to 40 per cent in 2024?
As Warren Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov, lead researchers on this subject, have put it: “ought to 60-year-olds in Russia in 1950 be thought of to be as aged as 60-year-old Swedes in 2050? If not, is there a greater various?”
DEFINING OLD AGE DIFFERENTLY
Sanderson and Scherbov’s proposed various is to outline the onset of “previous age” as the purpose when you have got 15 years of life expectancy left. Via this lens, the previous, current and future look very totally different.
Within the UK, for instance, which loved sturdy will increase in life expectancy up till the final decade, the variety of over-65s elevated from 8.3 million in 1981 to 11.7 million in 2017, however the variety of folks with a life expectancy of lower than 15 years fell from 8.1 million to 7.4 million.
And when you recalculate old-age dependency ratios with this definition of “previous”, they’re decrease in all areas of the world besides sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand), and they’re projected to rise a lot much less steeply.
