Journal of the Economics of Ageing最新文献

China is experiencing a rise in its ageing population alongside rapid advancements in industrial robotics. Using panel data from China’s industries (2006 to 2021), this study empirically examines the impact of population ageing on the application of industrial robots. The results show that population ageing significantly promotes industrial robot application. The impact of population ageing on the application of industrial robots varies by industry. The promotion effect is greater in low and medium-technology industries than that of high-tech industries. This effect became more evident after 2012. Industries with high state ownership exhibit stronger influence coefficients than those with lower state ownership. Mechanism analysis indicates that population ageing promotes industrial robot adoption through the labour cost substitution effect. These findings offer insights for government policies to promote sustainable ageing and upgrading the manufacturing sector through artificial intelligence represented by the application of robotics.

Aging populations exert upwards pressure on healthcare systems, raising concerns about increasing expenditures on health. This paper reviews the empirical literature on the issue and critically assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the outcomes measured, methodologies used, and the hypotheses tested. While age strongly predicts long-term care expenditure, the time-to-death factor renders the aging effect null for hospital care expenditure. Existing literature disagrees on the importance of age and time-to-death effects on prescription drug and ambulatory care costs. Morbidity and medical innovation mediate these effects, proving crucial for aging-related healthcare expenditure growth. We identify several opportunities for future research including gender differences, utilization of emerging methods, and the importance of institutional settings.

We study the socioeconomic horizontal inequity in the allocation of publicly subsidised long-term care (LTC) in Spain, using administrative data from the universe of applicants in Catalonia. We find that, after controlling for needs, cash subsidies for informal care are disproportionately concentrated among wealthier individuals, while the use of formal care services (home care and nursing homes) is concentrated among the less well-off. This suggests that cash benefits may inadvertently facilitate access to wealthier individuals’ private care. We also find inequity in the form of provision, with in-kind services being more prevalent among the worse-off while wealthier beneficiaries are more likely to receive vouchers. While this duality in provision does not lead to significant differences in overall time to access LTC, we find that lower-income individuals wait longer for telecare, and wealthier individuals opting for in-kind nursing home care wait longer, suggesting potential differences in preferences or constraints. We find no evidence of socioeconomic inequity in the time spent navigating the administrative application process. Our findings highlight the need for policymakers to consider the potential unintended consequences of cash benefits and different forms of provision to ensure equitable access to LTC services.

This study examines the impact of population ageing on high-technology exports, employing both theoretical and empirical analyses. Using data of 171 countries from 2000 to 2019, we find that higher population ageing significantly reduces a country’s high-technology exports. On average, a country’s high-technology exports decline by 0.5–1.1 percent for every one percent increase in population ageing. Moreover, the negative effects of ageing populations on high-technology exports are mitigated in countries with greater utilization of industrial robots, higher digital economy development, and superior institutional quality. The mechanism analysis suggests that population ageing primarily influences high-technology exports through increasing production costs and reducing human capital levels. The results remain valid after applying instrumental variables approaches and exploiting an exogenous policy shock. This paper presents the most comprehensive analysis to date of the relationship between a country’s age structure and its export capacity, with a particular focus on high-technology products.

As populations age, more people worldwide will live and die with serious illness like cancer, heart disease and dementia. Prior projections of serious illness prevalence and end-of-life care needs have typically used static population-level methods. We estimated future disease prevalence and healthcare costs by applying dynamic microsimulation models to high-quality individual-level panel data on older adults (aged 50 + ) in Ireland. We estimated that the number of people living and dying with serious illness will increase approximately 70 % over 20 years. Per-capita annual costs both at end of life and not at end of life increase substantially due to ageing populations and growing complexity. Total health system expenditures on care for people with serious illness are projected to double before accounting for rising cost of inputs in real terms. Decomposition of these estimates suggests that 39 % of additional costs are accounted for by rising absolute numbers of older people, 37 % by changing age distribution and growing life expectancy, and 23 % due to rising individual complexity including morbidity and functional limitations. Our results and methods will be of interest to other countries planning for the future population health needs, and formidable health system resources associated with these needs, in the coming years.

China’s elderly households are characterized by higher holdings of cash and cash equivalents and lower holdings of stocks and bonds in their financial portfolios. We utilize the public Long-term Care Insurance (LTCI) reform and data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) to examine how LTCI coverage affects risky asset holdings among newly insured elderly households. Employing a difference-in-differences methodology, our findings reveal that LTCI significantly increases the share of risky assets in the financial portfolios of older families. The increased preference for risky assets may be a result of a weakening incentive for precautionary savings. Decomposing risky assets into bonds and stocks, we find that the increase in the share of risky assets following the LTCI pilot comes mainly from bond investments rather than stocks, which indicates that LTCI has a limited effect on risk asset holdings among the Chinese elderly. Our study contributes to understanding the economic impacts of China’s public LTCI by showing that LTCI may lead to changes in asset allocation strategies among elderly households.

The balance between maintaining and enhancing the health, quality of life, and healthy life expectancy of the elderly and their corresponding social costs, including medical and long-term care expenses, is an important policy issue in the context of Japan’s super-aging society. In this paper, we employ individual panel data from the four waves of the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement to examine how retirement from the labor market affects the health of elderly males. Numerous empirical studies have shown mixed results concerning the causal effect of retirement on health through diverse and complex mechanisms. However, we present several new insights by focusing on the policy change in 2000 of raising the pensionable age for the earnings-related public pension system which completely eliminates pension income after the statutory retirement age for particular cohorts. Our fixed-effects instrumental variable estimation shows that retirement significantly improves oral function and mental health, but it also makes male retirees more susceptible to lifestyle-related diseases. Supplemental results further suggest that a significant increase in dental care utilization would help improve post-retirement oral function.