Education, Elderly Health, and Differential Population Aging in South Korea: A Demographic Approach

Abstract

AbstractBACKGROUNDPopulation aging proceeds with other socioeconomic developments, including educational expansion. Improvements in educational attainment lead to changes in demographic behaviors such as assortative mating, fertility, and the intergenerational transmission of education, which change the health of the elderly and the education of their offspring generation.OBJECTIVEWe examine such a jointly-changing process in South Korea.METHODSWe apply a recursive demographic model (Mare and Maralani 2006) by using the Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing (KLoSA).RESULTSFirst, improvements in education lead to improvements in health among the elderly. Intermediate demographic factors make positive contributions to this improvement. Second, improvements in education lead to a decline in the ratios of offspring to the elderly because better-educated people have fewer children. However, this decrease is not substantial. Third, improvements in education increase the ratio of college-educated offspring to the unhealthy elderly because of improvements in both offspring's education and elderly health.CONCLUSIONThe results suggest that improvements in education change configurations of the elderly and their offspring's generations, mitigating the negative consequences of population aging, such as increasing burdens of elderly support.(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)1. Introduction: Alternative ways to measure population agingPopulation aging is a worldwide phenomenon, with the median age of the world population forecast to rise to 38.1 years in 2050 from 26.7 years in 2000 (Goldstein 2009). Population aging has important socioeconomic consequences because the age structure of a population determines the ratio of net producers to net consumers in a population. Hence, most industrialized countries are concerned about negative consequences of population aging and have attempted to develop pronatal policies that balance the population's age structure (Kalwij 2010; McDonald 2002). Population aging, however, also occurs in tandem with other socioeconomic changes such as educational expansion and improvements in health, which may mitigate the consequences of rising dependency ratios. Skirbekk, Loichinger, and Weber (2012) proposed a new measure of population aging-the cognition-adjusted dependency ratio (CADR)-and showed that the ranking for degree of population aging depends upon the measures: whereas India has fewer elderly people per working-aging individual than the U.S., the U.S. has fewer cognitively-limited elderly people per working-age individual than India. There is also evidence that increasing human capital per capita may offset the loss of total economic product due to fertility decline in a population level (Lee and Mason 2010) and the cost of supporting an elderly population may be reduced as the health of the elderly has continued to improve over decades (Martin, Schoeni, and Andreski 2010). In other words, -population aging is intrinsic to the processes that bring us a highly-educated population and comfortable standards of living (Lee and Mason 2010: 179). In this study, we examine changing joint configuration of the elderly and their offspring in terms of health and educational attainment by applying a demographic model.Accounting for the changing configurations of the elderly and the offspring generation is important in population aging. This has been largely overlooked, however, in previous research. Earlier studies found that the better-educated enjoy better health and survival chances in later life than do the less educated (e.g., Cutler and Lleras- Muney 2008; Elo and Preston 1996). Based on this positive educational gradient in health and survival chances, recent studies have used educational attainment in projecting the size of the elderly population in the future (Batljan, Lagergren, and Thorslund 2009; Batljan and Thorslund 2009; Joung et al. …