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Japan in the New Global Demography: Comparative Perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Roger Goodman  and
S Harper
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The Asian/Pacific region, currently home to six hundred million older people, is the most rapidly ageing world region, with twenty percent of its projected population over sixty by 2050, which will at that date account for two-thirds of the world's two billion elders. Indeed, UN projections predict that by 2040 there will be more individuals aged over sixty than under fifteen in the region and Asia will have followed Europe in becoming the world's second so-called ‘mature’ region. Key here is the speed at which this transition is occurring. While it took the EU 15 (the 15 member states of the European Union prior to enlargement) some 120 years to go from being a young to mature population (with maturity being achieved in 2000), such a shift in the proportion of young and old will have occurred in Asia in less than 25 years. While the predicated increase in the percentage by 2025 of people over sixty for the EU 15 is around 33%, it is a staggering 400% for Indonesia, 350% for Thailand, and up to 250% for India and China. It is this rapidity of demographic ageing which will be central to the policy changes needed within the region.

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Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 5 , Issue 7 , July 2007 , e12
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
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Copyright © The Authors 2007

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