Demographic Bomb Research Articles

The elderly demographic time bomb - sharing the load with the active ageing: can eHealth technologies help defuse it?

This paper examines strategic health management and practical health service delivery issues inherent in the potential doubling in the number of over 65s over the next two decades. It considers the use of scarce and overloaded resources in providing care and support to this age group across the spectrum of community environments, and advocates the use of shared information services coupled with the deployment of 'smart' technologies to supplement available yet scarce professional resources as well as enabling elderly people to maintain a safe, active and independent lifestyle. An innovative approach to provide support both to an active ageing population, as well as the more frail or vulnerable members of society, is outlined. Based on an ongoing research programme, this centres on the extension of the Smart Home concept to create an overarching smart environment. This combines advanced information, communications and textile technologies with physiological monitoring and location based processes and services, to protect and support users by maintaining the range of services they need. Discussion of the behavioural dynamics inherent in organizational change concludes the paper.

A new model dependency ratio for European cities

Background: Sometimes referred to as ‘the demographic time bomb,’ the European Union, state and local governments are concerned about the impact of an ageing population on both sustainable economic development and the demand for health and social support services. Seeking to mitigate these pressures, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has developed a policy framework Live Longer: Work Longer and the World Health Organization (WHO) has set a policy framework for Active Ageing which maintains that early life course interventions can reduce levels of disability and dependency in older age. The WHO European Healthy Cities Network (WHO-EHCN) promotes healthy urban planning to encourage healthy lifestyles and maintain older people as a resource in the workplace and to their communities. Our objective is to develop a new model dependency ratio (NMDR) for European cities which synthesises these three policy frameworks. Methods: Starting from the classic formulation of the dependency ratio (DR), which compares the 'dependent' population segments with the working-age or 'productive' segments, the model is developed in six stages, drawing on data from secondary European and national sources and from primary sources contained in Healthy Ageing Profiles of fifteen (WHO-EHCN) cities. Results: From an orthodox baseline, the second stage of modelling increases the DR by moving economically inactive people of working age from denominator to numerator. Thereafter, refinements introduced in stages three to six, gradually reduce the DR. Conclusions: The NMDR challenges the 'demographic time bomb' predicted by orthodox formulations and can be used as a tool by city decision makers.

Human Rights in a Globalizing World: Who Pays the Human Cost of Migration?1

IntroductionUndocumented people from Mexico, Iraq, and other countries of the Global South risk their lives every day to enter the United States, France and other countries in the Global North, and many lose this wager on their lives. On May 13, 2003, at least 75 people, mostly from Mexico and Central America, who had just illegally crossed the US border, were packed into a 48-foot long truck trailer in order to sneak by a Border Patrol checkpoint approximately 45 miles inside the United States. Locked in the trailer, eighteen died that day from heat, dehydration and a shortage of oxygen and 56 others were caught by police, one of whom died later. The driver was arrested and, after a trial in late 2006, found guilty of smuggling resulting in death. In the penalty phase of the trial, in early 2007, the jury determined that the driver should be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.2Two years earlier, on February 17, 2001, the freighter East Sea that was carrying 912 migrants, most of who were Iraqi Kurds, was abandoned by its crew of smugglers and ran aground on a French Mediterranean beach. Although the migrants were crammed into holds in unhygienic conditions during the entire six-day voyage from Turkey and 22 had to be taken to French hospitals, none of them died. The migrants were given time to apply for asylum but more than a third of them disappeared without attempting to obtain asylum in France.3Many of those who have died trying to reach France or European countries further north such as Germany, Netherlands, or the United Kingdom, lost their lives in attempting to enter Spain or Italy from North Africa. At least 13 sub-Saharan Africans died trying to climb over the fences around the Spanish enclaves, Ceuta and Melilla, in Morocco in October 2005, and in 2006 many more died attempting to cross the Atlantic ocean from the western coast of Morocco, Mauritania, and Senegal to the Spanish Canary Islands, or the Mediterranean Sea from Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya to Malta and Italian islands. Precise estimates of those who have died in the water are not possible because many boats and bodies are never found.4One study analyzed the remains of those who were believed to have died during an unauthorized transit from Mexico to the United States between January 1, 2002, and December 31, 2003, in any county along the 650-mile section of the US-Mexican border from Yuma, Arizona to El Paso, Texas. Among the 409 migrants who died, environmental heat exposure (n=250; 61.1%) was the leading cause of death, followed by vehicle crashes (n=33; 8.1%) and drowning (n=24; 5.9%). Male decadents exceeded female decadents by nearly 3 to 1. More than half of those who died were known to be Mexican nationals (n=235; 57.5%) and were aged 20 to 39 years (n=213; 52.0%); the nationality of the others who died could not be determined.5These data cause us to question why people from Mexico and other countries are willing to risk their lives to emigrate. One analyst points out that on the African continent which is torn apart by poverty, disease, violence and corruption, a demographic and social time bomb ticks: half of Africa.s 900 million and growing population is under 17, and 40 percent live on less than $1.20 per day.6 There is a similar situation for the population in Mexico, 31 percent of which is under 15 years of age, and which has experienced a 25 percent decline in wages since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. Along the US Border, the wages for many workers in the maquiladoras, the multinational sweatshops, are from 60 cents to $1 per hour,7 far below a living wage in Mexico.The younger populations in Mexico, Africa and other geographical areas often believe that they can get better jobs and provide more for their families and relatives by working in the United States, France and other countries in the Global North and they willingly put their lives at risk to reach these destinations. …

IDP and Refugee Return to Northern Iraq: Sustainable Returns or Demographic Bombs?

Regime change in Iraq has opened the door to the return of hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), the majority of whom were expelled from Kirkuk and other areas in northern Iraq. The Iraqi case presents three broad, readily identifiable categories of displaced persons: refugees in Iraq's neighbouring states, internally displaced persons, and refugees and migrants in third countries further afield. The first two categories include the largest numbers of displaced people as well as the majority of those with a great desire or pressing need to return to their homelands in Iraq. Although some of those displaced have succeeded in making a good life for themselves in their new new homes, those who did not manage well after their displacement generally long to return to their original towns and homes. However, the following general problems, in order of gravity, impede the success and sustainability of returns to northern Iraq: (i) sectarian competition over political structures and power distributions in post-Saddam Iraq; (ii) increasing lack of security in Iraq; (iii) insufficient preparations and slow policy implementation by the former CPA and Coalition Forces; (iv) insufficient financial resources to deal with the full magnitude of the displacement problem in Iraq; and (v) high expectations of returnees vis-a-vis continuing lack of opportunities and the slow rate of positive developments in the social, economic and political situation in Iraq. However, the emerging political contests over the future of the new Iraq greatly complicate effective and comprehensive return programs; the ultimate test of success and sustainability of return to Iraq will depend on the future of post-Saddam Iraq itself.

China's Economic Rise and the New Geopolitics

BACK TO THE FUTUREFollowing a quarter of a century of robust, double-digit economic growth, China is now poised to overtake the United States as the world's largest economy (in purchasing power terms) within two to three decades. When this happens, China will not only be ending a 150 years of US reign, but will also be reclaiming the primacy it first obtained a millennium earlier when it pulled away from western Europe to become the biggest economy on the planet. Today, the Chinese factory to the is producing not only garments and toys but computer components, cars, and aircraft, and sets its eyes even higher. The Chinese have successfully launched manned space missions, something only two other nations have managed before, and are planning further space exploration. They are investing heavily in the technologies of the future, such as nanotechnology and fuel cells, that will help their nation cement a leadership position in the economic arena as well as in world politics.Naturally, China's continuous economic progress depends on its ability to contain or overcome numerous problems. A manifestation of the remaining and often growing obstacles en route to China's modernization is social unrest-naturally a threatening phenomenon to a non-democratic regime whose legitimacy is underpinned by a modern mandate of heaven-that is, by its ability to continue to deliver economic prosperity. The discontent reflects a number of serious problems, such as China's rising inequality between rich and poor, whether individual citizens or provinces, and is amplified by past professed beliefs in egalitarianism and a long tradition of local squabbling, pervasive corruption at many levels of business and government, massive pollution, and a demographic time bomb resulting from the one-child policy, which means that a shrinking working population must support an ever-growing number of retirees whilst a national security system is still in its infancy. Just as these concerns are mounting, the dismantling of rural collectives and the decline of state-owned enterprises have taken away what used to be the regime's most effective control apparatus, making such challenges to the party's authority more ominous.Abroad, China is also facing challenges that may well spill into its own borders. On the Taiwan front, China has pushed itself into a corner such that quasi-declarations of independence may compel it to invade the island, jeopardizing its global and economic prospects. In Hong Kong, where prodemocracy forces are testing the limits of expression and offering an unwelcome alternative model to the mainland's residents, China has retreated, for now, from enforcing unpopular antisubversion measures, but remains hesitant about its future course. In the rest of east and southeast Asia, concerns about the rising economic, political, and military power of the Chinese are not too far from the surface, and may be triggered by a single crisis. Further ashore, China is facing the prospects of American and European protectionism, which represents a serious threat to an economy that is increasingly reliant on exports.OBSTACLES AND THEIR SOLUTIONCan China overcome those daunting challenges? I believe it can, as it did in some 25 years of reform, despite the early observations of multiple western economists that it was not possible to have a successful free market economy under a non-democracy. Most forgot that Hong Kong, Milton Friedmaris poster boy of a free market, was a British colony whose residents had even less power to elect their rulers than under the current Chinese rule. China, in my opinion, is likely to continue its economic march forward but is unlikely to follow the route laid by most western observers, that is, by edging ever-closer to a democratic, US-style system. Not only will that not happen in the foreseeable future, but China will instead develop and prosper with an alternative model that many nations, especially in the developing world, will find appealing: one-party control administered via a merit-based bureaucracy but without separation of powers, something not too removed from the imperial model, in which a dynasty ruled through a capable bureaucracy made up of a combination of generalists and professional experts, with the former in charge. …

Migration, financial flows and development in the Euro-Mediterranean area

The migration issue in the Mediterranean region has been widely monitored and assessed in the last decade. Its various socioeconomic causes and impacts—demographic, social, political and economic—have been largely analysed, and, despite differences in the approaches, there has been broad consensus as to the conclusions: that by the turn of the twenty-first century migration would become an explosive issue for the Mediterranean region, and that today we are facing the consequences. The risk described as a ‘demographic bomb’ is no longer a risk; it has exploded and can be seen in the daily dramas along the Italian and Spanish coasts of the Mediterranean basin. The root of the issue can be mainly attributed to the impacts of globalisation: economic marginalisation of the peripheral areas and the political destabilisation of both the countries and the region at large. The failure of the Barcelona Process, followed by the decreasing influence of the EU, has distorted the regional development process from a process of Euro-Mediterranean ‘partnership’ for a ‘shared prosperity’ to the implementation of a ‘free trade area’ and neoliberal policies, with negative social impacts certain to follow. It is demonstrated that migrations from southern Mediterranean countries are the results of both push (marginalisation and destabilisation) and pull (economic concentration and wealth in the North) factors. This paper is part of a larger research project exploring the establishment of new economic–financial links through the actions of migrants between two European countries (Denmark and Italy) and two Arab countries (Morocco and Tunisia), and the problems and benefits that have arisen or have the potential to do so. This paper specifically presents the results for Morocco and focuses on: (i) the amount and direction of the remittances, (ii) their destination in the recipient areas, (iii) their role in local development and, finally, (iv) possible lessons to be learned for the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. Though remittances represent a very important contribution to Morocco's balance of payments, their role at the microeconomic level is still little explored. By presenting original empirical material collected during a field study conducted by the author in two rural provinces, some important conclusions can be drawn regarding the microeconomic impact of remittances on local development. Qualitative research was used to identify the patterns of utilisation of remittances and the existing institutional framework that coordinates and/or hinders their use. This has enabled the author to pinpoint the existing bottlenecks and some areas of policy intervention to stimulate their productive use and increase capacity to accelerate economic growth. The relevance of these indications in light of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership's co-development objectives is also presented.

Management: Plugging the Knowledge Gap

There once was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for understanding and fixing any kind of machine. After a long career with the same company, he happily retired. Several years later, the company contacted him regarding a problem with a piece of production equipment that seemed to be impossible to fix. They had tried everything, but nobody could return the equipment to full capacity. After much persuasion, the engineer flew out to the platform and spent a day studying the equipment. At the end of the day, he marked a small "x" on a component and stated that replacing this component would solve the problem. The component was replaced and full production was restored. Shortly after, a bill for U.K. £50,000 was received. Very unhappy with this, the company asked for an itemization of the bill. The engineer responded briefly: One chalk mark: £1. Knowing where to put it: £49,999.1 While this story is fiction, the problems described are real. Organizations that do not make a concerted effort to plug the knowledge gap will find themselves relearning, or renting, old knowledge at a high cost. It is no secret that the demographic profile of the oil industry is heavily weighted toward the baby-boom generation. What is not clear is the impact that this will have on the industry in years to come. Will the demographic time bomb go off and leave the industry in crisis or is this an overly pessimistic viewpoint? There is a real issue here that needs to be tackled, and the tools and techniques for doing so are well established and easily implemented. The key to avoiding critical knowledge loss, however, is a strategic framework that weaves together the ability to learn with the ability to retain key staff and to make a knowledge-sharing culture a reality. Framework for Knowledge Retention For a business to avoid knowledge loss, a strategy needs to be in place with the following key objectives for the organization: The organization must be able and willing to learn, in addition to the individual.Knowledge must be recoverable from staff and contractors.It must be easy to transfer knowledge when required.Human resources (HR) processes and practices must help knowledge retention.Information technology (IT) applications must support retention practices. Organizational Learning Kim2 defines individual learning as "increasing one's capacity to take effective action." If we assume that this definition can also apply to organizations, then organizational learning is about increasing the organization's capacity to take effective action—including maintaining aging platforms. The question then is, When we look at organizational learning, who is doing the learning?

Making Progress in Health Information Technology: More Realistic Leadership, Less Hype

THIS ISSUE OF Frontiers of Health Services Management presents two different but complementary perspectives on achieving what most would agree is a necessary step forward for the U.S. healthcare system-moving off paper and into the digital age. Michael Sachs presents a vision of what this transformed system might look like; Rosemarie Nelson lays out a practical step-by-step road map for getting there. While one might be tempted to conclude problem and uncritically climb on the healthcare information technology (IT) bandwagon, I would first offer a few words of caution. The vision for the optimal integration of health IT into clinical practice should certainly be bold, but it should not be uncritical or unrealistic. Similarly, the road map should lead to more than putting a computer on the physician's desktop, lest we simply end up with digitized dysfunction. IS THE VISION FOR HEALTHCARE IT POINTED IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION? Sachs's vision of the near-term future is certainly hopeful and bold (transformation of ...an information-enabled system without fragmentation is ...without question), but it is by no means certain. While one would like to think that within a decade our resuscitated healthcare system would have the latest bioscience wizardry virtually available to all, far more basic problems need to be solved first. Health IT will hopefully be part of that solution. The current system is fraught with dysfunction, fragmentation, and, in some areas, is itself on life support. Almost 50 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured. Almost half of our nation's hospitals are operating at a loss. Many emergency departments are so overcrowded that the average wait time is longer than a cross-country flight. Moving our sights from the hospital to the physician office does not present a better picture. The one-two punch of declining reimbursement and increasing practice hassles has led to widespread physician dissatisfaction, particularly in the primary care fields of internal medicine and family medicine. These physicians are retiring in mid-career or leaving practice for other non-patient care opportunities. Nor can we count on the next generation of doctors to fill in the gap. Each year fewer and fewer U.S. medical students chose careers in these primary care fields, and if it weren't for the international medical students accepting these training positions, the United States would already be feeling the effects of the impending shortage. If these challenges weren't enough, the population is aging; in spite of the dire IOM pronouncements of iatrogenic deaths (44,000-88,000/year) (Kohn et al. 2000), more people are surviving for longer periods of time with multiple chronic (and expensive) conditions. The implications of this demographic time bomb for Medicare are staggering (Rettenmaier and Saving 2004). Surfing the Web from the ICU Sachs's vision of patients biding their time in the ICU looking at their results and medical information is far-fetched and, if actualized, would lead to further waste of scarce resources. One of the reasons emergency departments have 6 to 8 hour waits is lack of bed availability in the critical care units. In the real world, when critically ill patients recover enough to sit up and focus on a computer screen (for medical reference reading or to download games), that patient is well enough to leave the ICU. How about the same vision, but for patients in a regular hospital bed? This might be a reasonable vision, assuming that the hospital really wanted to divert limited bandwidth from projects that involve, for example, mobilizing data and images for clinicians, but again, in the real world, patients aren't hospitalized except when severely ill. When patients are hospitalized for elective surgery, they are typically discharged once conscious and stable. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with extending ubiquitous Internet access to hospitalized patients, at a time when there is legitimate concern about just having sufficient hospital beds for our population, this seems at best frivolous. …

Principals' succession and educational change

A demographic time bomb is ticking in many school jurisdictions. Up to 70 per cent of present leaders in the private and public sectors will retire within the next five to ten years as the “baby boomers” move on. While succession planning has become a major initiative in the private sector, leadership succession in education tends to hew to old paths. Where are new educational leaders to come from? How should their succession be orchestrated? The traditional source of succession at the secondary level, the department headship, is no longer an attractive route for many teachers. Many potential leaders do not perceive the role of principal or assistant principal in a positive light. These roles are increasingly being associated with managing the standards/standardization agenda with which many professionals profoundly disagree. While it is premature to declare a leadership crisis in education, it is not too early to call on policy makers to attend to the growing need for succession planning at all levels in education. Based on an examination of change over times in four schools in Ontario, this article addresses issues of leadership succession in education and, more precisely, examines the influence of principals’ succession on the principals themselves and their schools.

Editorial: Welcome to the International Journal of Older People Nursing

Editorial: Welcome to the <i>International Journal of Older People Nursing</i>

Islam, Globalization, and Economic Performance in the Middle East

The Middle East is a demographic time bomb: the economy must grow 5-6 percent annually for the next two decades to absorb new entrants to the labor force. The only plausible way for this to occur is through a successful process of cross-border economic integration. Islam itself is not an impediment, but public opinion harbors reservations about globalization. This can create a vicious circle in which insecurity in both its economic and cultural dimensions precludes those measures necessary to accelerate growth.

British civil engineering skills: defusing the time bomb

The UK's civil engineering industry is facing a demographic time bomb. Half the country's chartered civil engineers—a total of 15 000 professionals—are likely to retire in the next ten years. During that period only 6 000 new graduates are expected to join the profession, leaving a shortfall of around 9 000 civil engineers. This paper analyses these alarming statistics and concludes that more funding is needed for domestic civil engineering degree courses if Britain is to avoid becoming reliant on foreign civil engineering skills.

British civil engineering skills: defusing the time bomb

The UK's civil engineering industry is facing a demographic time bomb. Half the country's chartered civil engineers—a total of 15 000 professionals—are likely to retire in the next ten years. During that period only 6 000 new graduates are expected to join the profession, leaving a shortfall of around 9 000 civil engineers. This paper analyses these alarming statistics and concludes that more funding is needed for domestic civil engineering degree courses if Britain is to avoid becoming reliant on foreign civil engineering skills.

The writing is on the wall, but are we reading it?

AbstractThe demographic time bomb is alive and ticking some 10 years after the initial warnings of its presence began to be sounded. So what have we done about it and how can we reconcile the needs of the emerging society with the environmental challenges that threaten our very existence over the long term? This article explores the issues and challenges the packaging industry to take up the gauntlet. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Two Worlds of Pension Reform in Western Europe

The European pension policy landscape is generally depicted as a major building site, where governments are scaling back the pension systems they have inherited from the postwar years in order to adapt them to population aging. Europe is often seen as a graying continent that will have to face the effects of a demographic time bomb and that needs to reduce its pension commitments radically. As a matter of fact, in the last decade pension policy has gained unprecedented levels of prominence in the political arena throughout western Europe, and several countries have cut pension schemes. This image reflects some broad trends, but a closer analysis of pension policy in western Europe reveals a number of other important developments. Pension systems are not simply being adapted to population aging but are responding to at least two additional sets of pressures: the new career profiles that have emerged with the transition to a postindustrial labor market structure and highly integrated international financial markets. Current pension systems were designed in a time characterized by stable labor markets and limited cross-border capital mobility. Changes in these two areas, as well as in the demographic composition of societies, create economic and political pressures to rethink part of their structure. European pension systems are exposed to these pressures in broadly similar ways. However, the way in which they respond to them varies considerably across countries and is to a very large extent shaped by the institutional structure of the pension systems that are currently in place. Population aging, labor market changes, and stronger financial market integration generate different political demands and policy responses depending on whether countries have a pension system based on the social insurance model, where one single public pension scheme provides the bulk of retirement income to the whole resident population, or a multipillar system, where the state takes responsibility only for basic income security and additional coverage is provided by occupational and private arrangements. European pension systems are path-dependent; micromechanisms link existing institutional structures to new policies.' In particular, policymakers face different incentive structures and political pressures under different pension institutional settings. Empirically, pension

Policy Discourses on ‘Reconciling Work and Life’ in the EU

This paper outlines the development EU policy discourse on ‘the reconciliation of work and family life’. This imposes a policy disjuncture on New Labour, for, while the British government may be ideologically more attracted to the liberal US model of ‘flexible’ labour, it is bound by EU law to implement a more corporatist gender equality model. The paper notes how themes of economic competition, democratisation, and protecting gender contracts emerged at the foundation EU gender policy. It traces these themes into an ‘equal opportunities at work’ discourse during the 1970s and 1980s and, with the increasing importance of the ‘demographic time bomb’ discourse and of Scandinavian style gender equality, into discourses stressing the ‘reconciliation of paid work with family life’ and gender mainstreaming. The paper ends by addressing the ‘half-empty or half-full’ assessments of EU gender policy.

Retaining a viable workforce: a critical challenge for nursing

Nursing is facing a crisis nationally and internationally with Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom and Western Europe experiencing critical shortages of nurses. Problems with recruitment, retention and an ageing workforce means that attempts to ensure a viable nursing workforce must be placed at the top of the professional agenda. Strategies currently used to manage the crisis, such as overseas recruitment, are not sustainable and are ethically dubious. The demographic time bomb is ticking and up to half the current nursing workforce will reach retirement age by 2020. It is vital that there are adequate numbers of skilled and qualified nurses to take their places. Nursing and nurses are facing unprecedented challenges and pressures in the workplace. Job satisfaction is threatened as nurses are pressured to do more with less. Nursing productivity has increased phenomenally over the past ten years in response to increased demands and decreasing numbers of staff. The nursing workplace has disturbingly high levels of occupational violence, and many nurses operate within a culture of blame and scapegoating. There is evidence that organizational change is imposed upon nurses with little or no consultation and the literature reveals that this has a direct and negative effect on job satisfaction and on retention of nurses. This paper explores some of the critical issues that nursing must confront to be successful in establishing and maintaining a vigorous, dynamic and viable workforce.

Older and Greyer — Third Age Workers and the Labour Market

At a time when increases in health and longevity indicate that workers are physically able to remain in employment for longer than their predecessors, the reverse has been the case. As a result of recession and redundancy, early retirement has become an accepted route to exit the labour market, and early exit has been encouraged in many countries as a means of alleviating youth unemployment. However, an approaching ‘demographic time-bomb’, which will put pressure on support ratios and social welfare costs, is stimulating the introduction of national and Community level initiatives to reverse the trend in early exit.

European Policy Issues

Shaver, S. (1988) ‘Universality or selectivity in income support to older people? A comparative assessment of the issues’, Journal of Social Policy, 27 (2), 231–254.Reynaud, E. (1998) ‘Pensions in the European Union: adapting to economic and social changes’. International Social Security Review, 51 (1), 31–47.These two articles are highlighted as both offer the reader some insights into the ongoing debate on the level of income in later life from a cross-national and comparative perspective. Recently the focus of this attention, particularly within the European Union (EU), relates to one of the myths of modern times, the devastation that will result because of the demographic time-bomb. I was pleased to see another refutation of this in Reynaud's article (p. 34). Thus the framework for this European-wide discussion has been as much about ideological and political issues as about economic ones, such as level of public provision of support in old age.These two articles approach the issue of income in later life from different angles. The Reynaud article is essentially a review of the current debate on public pensions within the EU. It focuses upon the manner in which pension policy has adapted to social and economic change in recent years. No statistical or quantitative analysis is presented and this limits the analysis somewhat. Shaver on the other hand adopts a classic quantitative approach, using a well-established dataset, the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), to revisit the longstanding debate about the merits of universalism and selectivism within the context of income in later life.

Current and Future Incomes for Older People

Income in retirement does not normally feature in national headlines, but scandals such as the misuse of the company pension fund by Robert Maxwell, and the financial advice given to join personal pension schemes have done just that. The ‘demographic time bomb’ has become a media cliché. In this first of two reviews of the incomes and financial circumstances of older people we examine the influence of these headlines and clichés on present and future incomes. To set the scene, the current levels and sources of income for older people are outlined and compared with those of the younger population. The following section describes the trends and changes in pensioners’ incomes and what has influenced these trends. The next sets out the main issues in providing a secure income in old age, and finally the current policy debate is reviewed and some questions are identified for re-examination in two years’ time.