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Latin America is ageing and urbanising …and fast


Latin America is ageing and the region is urbanising quite dramatically. This was the focus of a group of international and regional scholars who met last month in the stunning Bolivian capital of La Paz – where surrounded by the some of the highest mountains in the world we discussed these issues. The Oxford Institute of Population Ageing’s Latin American Research Network (LARNA) arranged a workshop to discuss the implications of both these major developments in the region. The workshop was hosted by the Institute of Social Research at the Universidad Mayor de San Andres in La Paz and attended by around 80 delegates.

 

The next decades are predicted to witness a veritable explosion in the number and proportion of older people in the region (United Nations 2015). The oldest population of the region in 2050 is expected to be Cuba with around 40 per cent of its population aged 60 years and over. So the next LARNA workshop is scheduled to take place in May in Cuba to engage with Cuban scholars and policy makers about the challenges and opportunities of an ageing population. 

 

The same goes for urbanisation.  In the mid-20th century, around 41 per cent of the region’s population lived in urban settings, and by 2015 this had doubled, with 80 per cent now living in urban settings. The region’s urban population is expected to comprise 86 per cent of total population by 2050 (United Nations 2014).

 

Not surprisingly then, the plight of older people in both the expanding cities of Bolivia and of those older people left behind in the rural areas was  a major theme of presentations from Bolivian scholars.

 

Now, is this development in the region necessarily a bad thing? Demographically, there is no reason why a particular age structure of a population should be good or bad. The causes for concern are linked more to the ability of societal infrastructures to accommodate changes in age structures, in this instance the transition from lots of young to lots of old people. However, there is likely to be a consensus that a world with few young people may not be a sustainable world, just as there is likely to be a consensus that continued and uncontrolled population growth is unsustainable. The balance may be the most preferable option – a balance of young and old in a stabilised population.

 

But do individual or even societal aspirations match this balance? Do individual aspirations to have few children and to live long, healthy lives collide with this idea of balance? Do societal aspirations to have a population with a balance collide with these apparent individual aspirations? Should we dissuade medical science from finding the cure for diseases of old age, thereby reducing our longevity and life expectancy? Should we exempt couples with 3 or more children from paying income tax?

 

What is particularly pertinent in this debate is the extent – if at all – to which these demographic trends can be reversed if so desired. So, for example, what will it take to convince young people to form families and have more (than one or even two) children? In the past, children were a resource. They contributed to family welfare (by working) and surviving children provided for the security in old age of their parents. Today, one could argue that children are a drain on a family’s resources, and survival is almost guaranteed.

 

Demographically, of course, children are important to provide new generations of workers and to maintain the population’s continued existence. This has to be seen against a backdrop of increasing concern about population development and environmental change.

 

It is a complex equation. And the predicted demographics can prove to be extremely difficult to influence by acceptable means.

 

The populations of Europe and North America aged through the 20th century and for these economies the future holds one of extremely low levels of fertility and radical life extension (Leeson 2014, 2014a). As we move into the 21st century, the populations of Latin America and the Caribbean, with their own history, culture and traditions, will begin to mirror this ageing, and countries are variously prepared or unprepared to take on the challenge (Brea 2003). For most of the 20th century, Latin America and the Caribbean had youthful populations, and it was not until the 1980s that the proportion of the population aged under 15 years dropped below 40 per cent. By 2010, less than 30 per cent of the population was aged under 15 years, while the proportion aged 65 years and over stood at around 7 per cent, having been at most 5 per cent for most of the century.

 

Why is ageing so important? In fact, one could argue that ageing per se is not important, but what is important is the age structure of a population, as this impacts on more or less all social phenomena from child care and schooling to housing and transport; from hospital care to long-term care; from the workplace to community services. However, in the relatively early stages of this ageing transition in Bolivia – and elsewhere in Latin America – ageing is up against a whole host of issues that the government and civil society struggles to address. So for example, at the workshop there were passionate appeals for the empowerment of older people from Professors Veronica Montes de Oca and Ricardo Iacub from Mexico and Argentina respectively, appeals that were taken up by the numerous delegates from Bolivia. The role of the family in this transition was centre stage for many of the presentations and much of the debate, and a particularly piece of research on the role of grandfathers in contemporary Mexican families was presented by Professor Alejandro Klein from the University of Guanajuato-Leon in Mexico.

 

However, there is some comfort to be found in the demographics of Latin America. Countries of the region have a lengthy period of demographic opportunity in which the total demographic dependency is declining providing in theory a backdrop for economic expansion fired by a growing labour force. The demographic window remains open for another 20 years – the time to address ageing populations in Latin America is now.

 

References:

Brea, J.A. (2003) Population Dynamics in Latin America, Population Bulletin, 58 (1), Population reference Bureau, Washington DC.

United Nations (2015) World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, New York.

United Nations (2014), World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division.

Leeson, G.W. (2014) Future prospects for longevity, Post Reproductive Health, Vol. 20 (1), pp. 17-21.

Leeson G.W. (2014a) Increasing Longevity and the New Demography of Death, International Journal of Population Research, vol. 2014, Article ID 521523, 7 pages, doi:10.1155/2014/521523.

 

About the Author

Dr. George W. Leeson is Co-Director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, University of Oxford.


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