ABSTRACT
For a host of interrelated reasons, the policies and politics of ageing are under unprecedented scrutiny in the industrial nations of the world. Once accepted and unremarkable, pension and health care programs focused on the aged are everywhere front-burner items on these nations’ political agendas. Well-documented demographic and economic forces are widely presumed to account for the pressured atmosphere in which policy discussions are now occurring. Their alleged role has recently been formalized under the rubric of ‘convergence theory’—an understanding in which widespread macro-level factors are posited as having common and profound effects on contemporary welfare states.
