Is there a wealth dividend of aging societies

Suhrcke, Marc, Fumagalli, Elena and Hancock, Ruth (2010) Is there a wealth dividend of aging societies. Public Health Reviews.

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Abstract

Apocalyptic views on the social, economic and health consequences aging abound. This review examines the potential upside of aging, in particular from a public health perspective. First, we review the evidence on whether there is healthy aging in the sense of a compression of morbidity: people spending less of the life years gained in poor health. The evidence turns out to be decidedly mixed, depending on the country, the data and perhaps most critically on the definition of “health” considered. Second, we explore the potential and actual labour market impact a healthy elderly population could make. We find considerable support for the notion that if only effective retirement age was raised to reflect past and future increases in life expectancy, then the result could be a significant increase in elderly labour force participation rates. Moreover, a significant share of the already retired elderly population is in good health, indicating a potential unused capacity for the labour market. Third, we turn to the impact of improved health (especially among the elderly) on health care expenditures. Evidence does generally not support the optimistic expectation that improved health will mitigate or even reverse the trend of increasing health expenditures. Even if better health may, in some circumstances, lead to lower health-care spending, other cost drivers, in particular technological advances, will more than outweigh any such expenditure-reducing effect. On the other hand, there is not much support for the hypothesis that better health by itself is a major cost driver. Policy can make a difference in facilitating the realisation of the potential benefits of a healthy aging scenario. This does, however, require a coordinated approach between social, economic and health policy and will enter into policy arenas in which the political costs of reform, despite their expected societal benefits, may become a hard to overcome bottleneck.

Item Type:	Other
Uncontrolled Keywords:	sdg 3 - good health and well-being ,/dk/atira/pure/sustainabledevelopmentgoals/good_health_and_well_being
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Norwich Medical School
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Groups > Health Economics Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Centres > Business and Local Government Data Research Centre (former - to 2023) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Groups > Health Services and Primary Care Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Groups > Public Health and Health Services Research (former - to 2023) Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Centres > Centre for Research on Children and Families
Depositing User:	Val Knights
Date Deposited:	21 Jul 2011 12:45
Last Modified:	15 Jun 2023 23:32
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/34029
DOI:

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