The present agenda of population ageing

A broad public discourse about the societal impact of population ageing has now emerged in a growing number of discussion groups, symposia, conferences and publications. In its components of continuous fertility decline, lowering mortality and increasing life expectancies at birth, thereby giving contours of new societies of longevity, its effects and consequences are now being debated beyond merely the experts in the field of public health, demography and life course research. After being treated for too long as a topic of only secondary importance, the negotiations about this epochal development have now become a frequent, if not already dominant, concern for most governments, media and scientific councils, not only on a national, but even more so on a global, level.

However, depending on the respective stage of demographic transition of each country, the response and perspectives to develop potential strategies to deal productively with these consequences of an ageing society will vary accordingly. Moreover, considering and debating demographic changes not only concerns the present and immediate future, but also requires an engagement in patterns and periods of long-term development of the respective demographic regime of each country. Therefore, a necessary and inevitable challenge for social strategies in all of these countries is to calculate the different time horizons, different compositions and needs of their sociodemographic settings. However, if this is done sensitively to each situation of sociodemographic changes, it should also provide opportunities for social forecasts, for action perspectives and for social planning.

For a long time, the sustained fertility decline (in the words of demographical expertise), together with an extended period of decreasing ‘dependency ratios’, was described as a ‘window of opportunity’. As a limited time period, it has been characterised (in the terminology of the UN Population Division) as the ‘demographic dividend’, about which much has been published. But, by using such economically inspired terminology, this seems to automatically imply an inevitable benefit for society. In fact, there are two dimensions in this ‘dividend’ situation: a strong increase in the size of the working-age population, and a relatively slow increase in the ‘dependent’ groups – children and older people. In other words, due to the decline in fertility, the number of children will increase more slowly than the number of people of working age.