The predictions are coming true. The world has more and more older adults than young people and children. This demographic transition, projected since the middle of the previous century, is accelerating and Latin America and the Caribbean, which for years was considered a young region, is aging faster than thought.
The advancement of medicine has allowed a greater life expectancy at birth and a reduction in the mortality of the elderly (from 65 years of age) and old people. This, coupled with the drop in the fertility rate, which in the region is 1.7 children per woman -lower than the global average-, has hastened this transition, to the point that its future is to be one of the territories with largest aging population in 2050, with all the challenges that this implies.
All the recent reports on demography (UN, ECLAC and the World Bank, among others) outline that a child born in the last two years -and from now on- can expect to live, on average, up to 71 years, which is almost 25 years older than those that arrived in the world in the middle of the 20th century.
As the aging of the population is the global trend of our time as well as, for now, an irreversible path, all nations face challenges in health, employment, education and retirement. Hence these are the arguments to modify the pension systems in the majority of the world, as unpopular as they cannot be postponed. And, at the same time, they must adopt public policies that guarantee health care and well-being of the elderly population.
At the beginning of the year, the report World Population Prospects, highlighted three aspects: the world population is growing at its slowest annual rate since 1950, below 1 percent for three years; the fertility rate has decreased significantly and it is highly probable that in 61 countries -the majority of Latin America and the Caribbean- it will drop to one percent or more by the middle of the century and that the age group over 65 years of age will will double by that date.
And although this demographic transition was projected for decades, what worries is that it has occurred more quickly than expected. Thus, only in Latin America and the Caribbean, andhe weight of the population under 20 years of age (approximation of the school-age population) began to decrease since the late 1960s. To the extent that the large population cohorts born before that decade were reaching the age of work, the weight of the potentially active population (20 to 64 years) began to increase, which gave rise to the period of the first demographic dividend.
On the other hand, the prolongation of life due to the decrease in mortality increased the proportion of older people (60 years and over), which rose from 6% in 1965 to 11.8% in 2017 and is projected to reach 2037. 20%, equaling the proportion of children under 15 years of age, which represents 147 million people in each age group.
It is worth clarifying that, if the region is in a stage of accelerated aging, its pace is uneven since, for example, Cuba and Barbados marked the milestone of equalizing the proportion of the two groups mentioned (young people and older adults) in 2010. , while the greatest slowdown in this process will be experienced by Granada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela.
Chile, Uruguay, Saint Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago will do the same in less than 2025; five years later, Costa Rica and Brazil, while Colombia, Antigua and Barbuda, Jamaica and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines will reach this proportion in another five years.
It is projected that in 2065 all the countries of the region will have more elderly people than children and young people.
With a cut to last year, Latin America and the Caribbean had 658 million people, of which some 52 million were older adults, posing great challenges to the countries such as those mentioned, in a context in which international organizations have foreseen that it will deepen the economic slowdown of the region this 2023.
“I am 65 years old and for employers, at 35 I was already too old to work and I could not reinsert myself as a technical nurse,” says Nelly García, a Peruvian migrant in the capital Lima, where she arrived with her parents when she was 10 years old since her native Huancayo, a city in the Andean center of the country.
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This Peruvian synthesizes the reality of the labor and assistance problems that many older adults have in the region, especially in the case of women whose exercise of maternity and care hinder job opportunities from an early age.
“Imagine at this age, well, what insurance and pension opportunities we can have for people like me or even older and with informal work,” said this nurse with bitterness, who took a break from work to raise her four children and when she decided to rejoin to the market was not successful because “they considered that at 35 I was already old.”
Peru, which has 33 million inhabitants, is facing a serious situation of economic, political and social crisis, with levels of poverty that increased during the pandemic to 30% as a national average, but registering higher rates in rural areas with 45%.
Its population over 60 years of age exceeds four million according to official figures, of which only a third, 35%, was affiliated with a pension system while 89% access health insurance. However, coverage and quality do not go hand in hand.
And that situation in the Andean country is repeated in tracing throughout the region. In other words, one is ‘old’ for the labor market at 30 years of age, a high proportion of the population is unable to retire and a low percentage is affiliated with social security.
Sabrina Juran, regional technical adviser on Population and Development for Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations Population Fund (Unfpra), argues that in addition to the low fertility rate in the region, the cPopulation growth is below 0.67% per year, lower than the global rate.
He explained that according to the latest United Nations projections, there would be around 695.5 million inhabitants in the region in 2030 with a peak of 751.9 in mid-2050, after which the population would constantly decrease until reaching a level of 649.2 million in 2100.
Juran explained that the further reductions in mortality are expected to lead to a global average longevity of about 77.2 years in 2050 and 80.6 years regionally. Life expectancy at birth in Latin America and the Caribbean was 72.2 years in 2022, three less than that registered in 2019, due to the impact of the covid-19 pandemic.
For the expert, the growth of the working-age population -it was 38.7% in 1990 and is currently 51%- can help boost per capita economic growth, known as the “demographic dividend”, which offers to maximize the potential benefits of a favorable age distribution.
“But this increase in the working-age population will not remain constant, in 2040 it will reach its maximum, with 53.8%, and then it will decrease, which means that there is a window of opportunity to take advantage of,” he said.
The region endures profound inequalities to the point that, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) the previous week, 22.5% of its population, that is, at least 131.3 million people, lack Resources for a healthy diet.
“Countries must invest in the development of their human capital, guaranteeing access to health care, quality education at all ages, and promoting opportunities for productive employment and decent work,” he remarked.
“At the United Nations, we advocate measuring and anticipating demographic changes to be better prepared for the consequences that arise,” he said, while reiterating that the commitment is “to a world where people have the power to make informed decisions about whether to have children and when, exercise their rights and responsibilities, navigate risks and become the foundation for more inclusive, adaptable and sustainable societies”.
Achieving this demographic resilience -he pointed out- begins with the commitment to count not only the number of people, but also the opportunities for progress and the barriers that stand in their way, which requires transforming the discriminatory norms that hold back individuals and societies.