Over the past year, the
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) has
engaged in leading-edge research on demographic change in East Asia. Karen Eggleston, director of the Asia Health Policy Program at Shorenstein APARC,
discusses the recent book Aging Asia: The
Economic and Social Implications of Rapid Demographic Change in China, Japan,
and South Korea, and the
workshop on the economic, social, and political/security implications
of demographic change in East Asia, held January 20-21 at
Shorenstein APARC.
Across Northeast Asia, countries are facing the issue of an aging population,
which causes socio-economic challenges that have policy implications. You
explore this phenomenon in your forthcoming book Aging
Asia: The Economic and Social Implications of Rapid Demographic Change in
China, Japan, and South Korea. When did aging begin to become an issue
and what are some of the greatest factors that you address in the book?
Aging started at different times in the countries of East Asia. The country
with the oldest life expectancy in the world and the oldest age structure of
its population is Japan. It had a very short baby boom after the war and has
had a steep decline in fertility. Mortality has also been falling around the
world, and so this creates a change in the population. Japan is already at the
fourth stage of demographic transition. South Korea is rapidly moving towards
that and already has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Of course,
neither of them have policies to reduce fertility; in fact, they are trying to
encourage it. China, on the other hand, has long been trying to control
fertility and is not as extreme in terms of the population age structure, but
it is rapidly changing. China will be older in median age than the United
States soon—this is not a trivial factor when you think in terms of the
absolute size of the Chinese population.
One of the things that we wanted to study in this project is the premise that
the demographic transition is a "problem." It is true that you need to think
about and have policy responses to it. But it can also be seen as a sign of
success, and as an opportunity. We wanted to reframe the issue and think about
evidence on both sides. There is some research highlighted in the book, for
example, that looks at the impact of population aging on economic growth, which
is one of the first things that comes to many people's minds. For example, if
you have a lot of elderly people, they are not in the work force and they need
to be supported. It is true that this can be bad for economic growth, but there
also are policy and individual responses that may moderate the effects. Our
research is trying to highlight several different aspects of aging, including
the question of opportunity. For example, there is more investment in
individual children now and elderly persons' savings have actually contributed
to economic growth. In some aspects, this has been a sign of resiliency for
Japan where there are a lot of transfers to the working-age population.
Ronald Lee at the University of California, Berkeley and Andrew Mason at the
East-West Center at the University of Hawai'i, who is participating in the
January workshop, have been working on the concept of a "second demographic dividend."
They find that as countries have an older age structure, there are more people
that are saving. In the widely accepted "first demographic dividend," there are
more people in the working-age part of the population—more people employed and
more people contributing to the GDP. You get a boom contributing to growth. We
know that this contributed to Japan and South Korea's earlier growth, and to
China's in the 80s and part of the 90s, but only one or two percent of GDP. The
question then is whether it is a problem that with aging you are losing that first
demographic dividend. A second demographic dividend might arise because people
who are preparing for a longer retirement life are saving more, and those
savings are then invested in the economy and the investment drives economic
growth.
Is there any correlation to demographic issues
faced by the United States?
Interestingly, the aging issue is more pronounced in East Asia than in the
United States for several reasons. We have a higher fertility rate than in
Japan and South Korea, and many other countries in Europe as well. We also
historically are much more open to immigration than most other countries, and
this has led to a certain vitality in the population mix that has slowed the
impact of demographic change. That said, of course, there are issues with
having a lot of baby boomers. Sometimes, depending on the specific question or
the specific area of policy, you find other factors that are much more
important than aging. For example, the growth of healthcare spending has been
in the news a lot lately. Although obviously there is an impact from having
more elderly people, there are much bigger issues, such as what we are spending
per person per age group and the growth of that spending. Just aging per se is not as big of an issue as
people might think.
In late January, you will be holding the
workshop Comparative
Policy Responses to Demographic Change in East Asia: Defining a Research Agenda. What
are the major issues you will explore in the conference? Who will be involved?
Finally, what is the publication or research project that you will launch from
this?
We had an Aging
Asia conference in February 2009, co-sponsored with the Global Aging
Program at the Stanford Center on Longevity. The outcome of this is the
forthcoming volume, co-edited with Shripad Tuljapurkar of the Department of
Biology at Stanford University. We started with a basic survey of the region
and thought about the basic trends-demographic, social, and economic-and built
upon that to figure out where the gaps are in the literature and where the
interesting research questions are. That is where the January 2011 workshop
comes in as the next step. We are bringing in some of the same and some
different people to focus on three specific themes: economics, society, and
politics/security. The upcoming event again focuses on East Asia and there will
be a public component, but it is a smaller event and its main goal is to dig
deeper into these themes to figure out an interesting research agenda on the
policy responses to demographic transition.
We decided to focus again on East Asia, which is the research focus of a lot of
our Shorenstein APARC faculty. Masahiko Aoki and Michael Armacost are going to
chair sessions, and Gi-Wook Shin is going to kick it all off and talk about the
social aspects of demographic change. Andrew Walder will be participating in
that session as well. Thomas Fingar will be covering the political and security
implications. All Shorenstein APARC faculty have been invited to participate
and think about how this issue of demographic change—and particularly policy
responses—might be related to their own areas of research.
An illustration that I like to give when people ask about how demographic
change is related to other things is from Andrew Walder when he was talking
about China's transition in the 1980s. He received a question about whether or
not there had been an impact from the One Child policy. He said that obviously
there are many different impacts, but the one thing that he noted was that students
in China now, especially if they are only children, are under a lot of career
pressure. This has changed the space or the freedom for self-exploration. Why
does this have broader implications? Young people see access to political power
as one key for their careers and this changes their views about joining the
Communist Party, which has big implications for China's political future. This
is just one illustration of how we are trying to explore the broader
implications of demographic change.
Finally, what is the outcome that you
would most hope to achieve through Aging
Asia and the upcoming demographic change workshop?
I think that the biggest hope would be to develop a much better understanding
of what is going on with demographic change: what are the processes and how is
society changing? What are the individual challenges that families are facing
and what are they are doing about it? What is the broader social or even global
perspective on how this is going to shape our future world? For me, I think
about the world that my children are going to grow up in.
Through our research, I hope that we will impact not only the understanding of what
has driven past developments, but create policy recommendations for each of the
societies that were are examining—including our own—on the opportunities and
the challenges related to changes in population. That hopefully will be useful
as these different societies think about how to respond.
Our research on the economic, the social, and political/security aspects of
demographic change is intended to be tangible for individuals and families as
well as for broader national policy.
