ABSTRACT
World-wide, there is a general consensus that the rise in the proportion of the Earth’s elderly will be the defi ning demographic feature of the twenty-fi rst century. Population projections in many countries have caused serious concern about old-age support in the future and simultaneously aroused hopes of a large and growing ‘grey market’. Already in 2000, the proportions of elderly in Japan (23%) and in the OECD (on average 18.6%) were high and projected to rise to 34 and 30 per cent respectively between 2000 and 2050.1 For the USA, the 70 million or so persons over the age of 50 years in 2004 were expected to increase to 108 million by 2015.2 However, it is China that is expected to age faster than any other country and to have the largest number of older people by 2030 and 2050. The percentage of the population aged 65 years and older is expected to rise from the current level of 7 per cent to near 12 per cent by 2020 so that by the middle of the century, the number of people in this age-category is expected to exceed 400 million.3 Over past decades too, life expectancy has doubled and by the mid-1990s was just more than 70 years.4 Indeed, this single-country rise in the numbers of those over the age of 65 years suggests that the speed of China’s ageing is without parallel. Very recently, in 2005, Asian Demographics, a research organisation, predicted that the decline in China’s total population under 40 years and the increase in numbers older than 40 and 60 years will amount to nothing less than ‘a demographic earthquake’.5 China is also unique because as it is often said, it is growing old before it gets rich. This rapid and unprecedented rise in both the world’s and China’s elderly has not only drawn attention to high dependency ratios and the likely inadequacy of support systems to cope with their care but also to the potential of new ‘greying markets’ which might be expected to augment consumer demand as they have already done in Europe and North America.
