ABSTRACT
Recently, the world’s population has experienced a remarkable transition, from a stage of high birth rates and death rates to one characterized by low death rates (Shrestha 2000). The core of this transition has been the growth in the number and proportion of older persons (Bloom, Canning, and Fink 2008; Olshansky and Carnes 2007; Smith and Mensah 2003). In the history of civilization, the unprecedented growth in the elderly population has been remarkable and calls for urgent attention to the needs of the elderly. The recent dynamics of aging in less developed countries (LDCs) implies that LDCs will have less time to cope with the eff ects of population aging than more developed countries (Makoni 2008; Tucker and Buranapin 2001). Since aging involves social, behavioral, and biological processes, studies that range from genetic contributions to chronic disease susceptibility (e.g., Olshansky et al. 2005) to the eff ects of economic growth on the elderly’s living arrangements (e.g., McGarry and Schoeni 2000) are inevitable. Aging involves many multifaceted processes that have implications at the micro level for the analysis of individual lives and at the macro level for the analysis of population and historical changes (Schafer and Ferraro 2009).
