Today, countries in the so-called ‘Global South’ are experiencing rapid population ageing and by 2050 are expected to account for 80 per cent of the world’s older people. Despite this, our current understanding of ageing is dominated by research that comes from the ‘Global North’.
The gerontological literature remains dominated by countries from North America and Europe. Of all the articles published in gerontology journals in the past five years, 37 per cent originate from the USA. Overall, high-income countries comprise 80 per cent of all gerontology articles, despite only making up around 30 per cent of the world’s older population. Hence, there is a clear and pressing need to encourage and support the publication of ageing research from and about a wider, more diverse range of countries.
We also need to look beyond the traditional notion of nation state and critically consider the geographies of ageing that we use when conducting research. The places in which we age have become increasingly complex and are constantly changing. Globalisation has undoubtedly impacted ageing and later life. But now there is evidence that the growth and spread of the neoliberal form of globalisation seen over the past few decades is slowing down or even reversing. Some have argued that we are entering a period of de-globalisation. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic and the deepening climate crisis demonstrate our global interconnectivity and the challenges that we all face.
In concert with these global transformations, the fate and nature of the world’s economic and political regions, which seemed so solid, are changing. The world is made up of many different, often overlapping, regions. Some of these, like the EU or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), are large suprastate multinational organisations. Alternatively, regions can be cultural, economic, linguistic and/or geographic. Some of these sit wholly within national states, while others might cross borders, e.g. cultural and/or ethnic communities in different countries.
Many of these regions are now experiencing relatively rapid population ageing. For example, the proportion of the population aged 65 and over in the ASEAN region grew from 5.3 per cent in 2000 to 7.5 per cent in 2022. In response, the ASEAN nations have signed up to the ‘Kuala Lumpur declaration on ageing’ which contains ten key commitments to take ‘concrete action towards the empowerment of older persons’, e.g. to promote age-friendly communities/cities in the region through sustainable and accessible infrastructure. Moreover, this demographic change has been accompanied by social and cultural changes. Across East Asia there has been a shift in people’s attitudes about the traditional role of families in providing financial security for older adults. Results from the East-Asia Retirement Survey found that the majority of workers in these countries were in favour of the state taking a more active role in encouraging savings and providing economic support in later life. We have seen similar shifts in the expectations and practices of family-based caregiving for and by older adults in India. In response, the International Labour Organization (ILO) has recommended that ASEAN nations work to harmonise retirement ages to overcome the challenge that the region is ‘ageing before being rich’. Hence, it is clear that regions continue to play an active role in shaping the conditions of later life for many people.
In the midst of all of this, the nation state, once seen as ‘too big for the small problems and too small for the big problems’, is experiencing a resurgence. However, it is unlikely that we will see a return to the nation-state of old. As the ILO notes, the idea of a ‘welfare state’ has become increasingly anachronistic. It argues that this has been replaced by the ‘social investment state’ in which social benefits are seen as investments in people in order to enhance economic growth and productivity. What this and the increasingly populist politics that seem to accompany the reassertion of national sovereignty mean for older adults and later life are also important topics of research. Whatever form these new nation states take, they will have to deal with the subnational regions and powerful global cities within their borders. This series of transformations poses challenges for gerontology as well as for older people themselves.
We recently launched the Journal of Global Ageing with a mission to redress these gaps in our knowledge of global population ageing. We started the journal with three interlinked objectives:
- to understand the global processes of ageing and provide a forum which represents the global nature of population ageing, in particular, encouraging submissions from those countries and regions that are currently underrepresented in our field;
- to invite authors to move beyond the methodological nationalism that dominates much of social gerontology and to consider a range of different (social, material and environmental) geographies of ageing and later life;
- to develop a more compassionate, supportive experience for all involved in the publication process.
The first issue of the Journal of Global Ageing is out now and contains a truly global spread of papers with studies covering a wide range of countries, from Uganda to the USA, and a fascinating variety of topics, including sexual activity, the use of IT during the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of transport policies and the quality of life among older migrant groups.
Martin Hyde is the Editorial Lead of the Journal of Global Ageing and Professor of Management at the University of Leicester.
Read the launch issue of the Journal of Global Ageing for free until 31 July, on Bristol University Press Digital here.
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