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The countries that make up South Asia have young but rapidly aging populations. The purpose of this paper is to investigate some of the challenges that this rapid aging creates for societies and organizations in South Asia. It also points out how, properly managed, aging populations can create multiple opportunities for societies and organizations alike.

The paper uses secondary data about the aging situation globally. It pays special attention to the demographic situation in South Asian countries and uses as examples policies dealing with aging populations in other countries that have gone through demographic transitions in the recent past.

Aging populations are bringing about numerous challenges in the region, including rising costs for pensions and healthcare, higher dependency ratios, and changing family dynamics. South Asia will enjoy a one-time demographic dividend. Policy makers and managers need to put the right policies in place to ensure that they take maximum advantage of this opportunity.

The study is based on secondary data. It is a perspectives piece and does not provide an in-depth study of the specific issues raised.

The study details how organizations can best manage this transition. This includes planning for a multigenerational workforce, providing accommodations for older workers, and fostering mentoring, knowledge transfer, cross-training and mixed-age work teams.

This study analyzes some of the social issues that arise because of aging populations, such as the challenge of creating pension and healthcare systems, dealing with a rising old age dependency ratio, and dealing with a gradual transition to single-family households.

This is one of the first studies that look at the coming demographic transition in South Asia, and details some of the challenges and opportunities that arise both in terms of policies and managerial implications.

Undertakes a critical study of population theory and demographic change in the history of economic thought and then presents an alternative theory of social change within which demographic change can be taken up. This latter kind of theoretical construct is shown to be an endogenous theory of population change and demographic transition wherein policy variables are taken up as ethical parameters endogenously affecting social issues and interactive decisions. Examples here are shown to be fertility decisions of families, migration policies and others. On the contrary, shows that in the history of economic thought it has been an exogenous approach towards explaining optimal population (Malthus theory), dynamic version (Canan) or a policy‐exogenous but fertility‐endogenous theory of household preferences to children as consumer or capital good that has been presented by the neoclassical and classical schools. A brief critique of Marxist view on population change is also covered. In conclusion, tries to establish the logical validity of an endogenous theory of population and points to its empirical possibility.

The US fertility transition in the nineteenth century is unusual. Not only did it start from a very high fertility level and very early in the nation’s development, but it also took place long before the nation’s mortality transition, industrialization, and urbanization. This paper assembles new county-level, household-level, and individual-level data, including new complete-count IPUMS microdata databases of the 1830–1880 censuses, to evaluate different theories for the nineteenth-century American fertility transition. We construct cross-sectional models of net fertility for currently-married white couples in census years 1830–1880 and test the results with a subset of couples linked between the 1850–1860, 1860–1870, and 1870–1880 censuses. We find evidence of marital fertility control consistent with hypotheses as early as 1830. The results indicate support for several different but complementary theories of the early US fertility decline, including the land availability, conventional structuralist, ideational, child demand/quality-quantity tradeoff, and life cycle savings theories.

The study attempts to establish the relationship between demographic dividend and GDP growth rate by utilising panel data from 1990 to 2017 in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

This study employs the pooled OLS model, using data from the World Bank's database for the period 1990–2017 for five selected South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries.

The results reveal that demographic dividend affects economic growth in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, thereby supporting the demographic dividend hypothesis. For the country-specific analysis, it was also observed that demographic dividend impacts the economic growth of the five SAARC countries. In addition, growth of gross capital formation is highly significant for both aggregated and country-specific analyses. However, economic growth is unaffected by trade openness and unemployment rates. Moreover, the rate of labour force participation is negatively related to the GDP growth rate in the aggregated model.

This paper bestows insight into the fact that the impact of demographic dividend on the economic growth of the SAARC regions cannot be fully actualised if the workforce are underutilised. This region needs to adopt appropriate policies to strengthen the considerable benefits of demographic dividend on the economic growth.

In recent years, Asian countries have experienced rising rates of premarital cohabitation, mirroring a similar trend that could be observed in many European countries several decades ago. As international differences in these trends are often attributed to institutional and societal differences, this study explores how China’s and Germany’s welfare and cultural regimes relate to national differences in the timing and prevalence of premarital cohabitation and direct marriage.

On the basis of two post-hoc harmonized surveys (pairfam for Germany; CFPS for China), descriptive analyses and logistic regressions were conducted. A higher standardization of partnership trajectories during the transition to adulthood was observed in China; this being probably related to China’s collectivist and Germany’s individualistic culture. While urban–rural differences prevail in China, and are attributable to China’s hukou system, East and West Germans differ considerably in this regard, a finding which can be traced back to regional differences in historical legacy. Discrepancies in economic modernization explain why the likelihood of experiencing these events differs for individuals in the Eastern and Western Chinese provinces.

Besides these differences, the two national contexts resemble each other in the prevalence of educational hypergamy, as well as in greater rates of cohabitation prior to first marriage, in contrast to direct marriage, seen among wealthier individuals and those with higher education. For the first time, the effects of cultural and institutional differences on the transition to adulthood were compared between a collectivistic vs. individualistic cultural regime and a productivist vs. corporatist conservative welfare regime, enabling researchers to draw conclusions about the link between cultural and welfare regime types and partnership patterns.

The purpose of this paper is to determine how population ageing is related to economic growth as measured by real GDP per capita in Japan. This study is to address the following questions: first, how is population composition by age group related to economic change? Second, how is the dependency ratio related to economic change? And finally, what are the predictions for economic growth in the future? This study answers these questions in relation to Japan.

Regression methods were applied to single-country data for the period 1975-2011.

This study finds that an increase in the 70-74 population age group is associated with a decrease in economic growth, while an increase in the 75 and over population age group is associated with an increase in economic growth in Japan.

The relationships that were found in this study do not imply causation from demographic change to economic change.

One potential way of promoting sustainable economic growth under conditions of population ageing is to devise a comprehensive policy that focuses on demographic factors.

This study analyses population ageing and economic growth in Japan using single-country data by applying regression methods.

This study investigates the impact of demographic structural changes on economic growth using data for Asian economies covering the period 1960–2020. Other factors affecting economic growth, such as human capital, are also considered.

A fixed-effects model and a fixed-effects model with endogenous covariates are used to examine a dynamic demographic model covering different age cohorts (i.e. youth-age, working-age and old-age populations) and other factors impacting economic growth.

The working-age population share, the labour force relative to the working-age population and growth of the actively employed population have significant and positive impacts on economic growth. Population growth and the youth-age population share exert a significant and negative impact on economic growth. A second and silver demographic dividend is found arising from a significant and positive association between the old-age population and economic growth. Human capital has an inverted U-shaped association with economic growth. Environmental degradation is significantly and negatively related to economic growth. No evidence is found for the importance of migration.

The positive association between the old-age population and economic growth indicates the policy significance of retirement-income systems with high coverage to enhance economic growth in Asia. Lifelong learning and preventative health measures can also be supportive policies to strengthen the third (silver) demographic dividend via the extension of retirement for productive and healthy elders.

This study is the first to examine the impacts of demographic structure, human capital, migration and environmental degradation on economic growth in Asia, using the most up-to-date longitudinal data from 1960 to 2020. Unlike previous empirical studies, this study discovers empirically based evidence to support Asia's second and silver demographic dividends.

It is well known that mental health disorders cause substantial functional limitations and disability (Surgeon General, 1999). Less well known is the central role that mental health plays in economic disparities. The prevalence of depressive disorders is almost 3 times as high among individuals in the bottom 20% than among individuals in the top 20% of the income distribution, a much steeper gradient than for hypertension, heart disease, arthritis, chronic pain, or the number of medical problems (Sturm & Gresenz, 2002). In addition, individuals with mental disorders are less likely to have savings than individuals with physical health problems and the disparity widens with advancing age (Gresenz & Sturm, 2000).